Unlocking the Promise of Bacterial Electrogenicity

Microbial electron transfer capability, or 'electrogenicity' creates a plethora of concepts and potential applications that offer environmentally sustainable advances in the fields of biofuels, wastewater treatment, bioremediation, desalination, and biosensing. Despite its vast potential and remarkable research efforts, bacterial electrogenicity is arguably the most underdeveloped technology used for those applications. Severe limitations are placed on the intrinsic energy and electron transfer processes of naturally occurring microorganisms. Significant boosts in this technology can be achieved with the growth of synthetic biology that manipulates microbial electron transfer pathways and improves their electrogenic potential. What is needed is a high-throughput, rapid and highly sensitive test array for investigating the electrogenicity of hundreds of newly discovered, genetically engineered bacterial species. This is by no means a simple challenge, as accurate and parallel quantitative measurements of bacterial electrogenicity require a long measurement time (10's of days), continuous introduction of organic fuels (10's of milliliters), complex device architectures, and labor-intensive operation. The overall objective of this NSF proposal is to create the ability to achieve rapid (10-fold improvement), and high-throughput (>384 wells) characterization of bacterial electrogenicity from a single drop of culture (