Enhanced recovery of a biofilm-enabled microbial fuel cell-based biosensor from toxic shocks for wastewater quality monitoring

• Main Author: Tang, Nehemiah Sheng En
• Other Authors: Cao Bin
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: Nanyang Technological University 2022
• Subjects: Engineering::Environmental engineering
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/163787
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Microbial fuel cells (MFC) are devices driven by bacterial metabolism and biofilm formation, as has been widely applied in various fields. This is due to its unique capability of sustainable power generation utilizing chemical energy stored in organic wastes. By harnessing bacteria’s ability to respire and oxidize various electron donors with diverse enzymes, MFCs are often employed in environmental pollution treatment and monitoring. However, multiple limitations to this technology still exist due to its novel nature, such as low sensitivity, short-term performance and low specificity. Hence, research is conducted to hopefully improve upon the current models of MFC-based biosensors, as the technology is shown to be quite promising in terms of providing real-time, in-situ monitoring with a compact nature and is self-powered. Extensive studies have been carried out to increase detection limits and throughput, along with expanding on trace monitoring. In this report, we specifically focused on the “short-term performance” aspect of the device, whereby utilizing recombinant techniques, enhanced versions of microbial strains are engineered and tested to showcase both its improvements and advantages over wild-type strains. The parameters that we focused on were the recovery rate and degree of recovery of MFC-reactors’ voltage outputs post toxic shock/pollutant exposure. Results obtained from this study were non-ideal, as a recovery of the transformed biofilm did not occur and voltage output dropped significantly, the values post-toxic shock were incomparable to pre-toxic shock as there was a huge difference. These results generally indicated that BphS-13 transformed MR-1 did not exhibit enhanced recovery.