Microbial Fuel Cell Research at Berkeley Promising

Professor Coates research team at Berkeley University have been researching using bacteria to perform the process of electricity generation. Instead of using the normal PEM catalysts microbial environments depend on the decomposition of organic compounds to produce electricity.

The team at Berkeley have produced small fuel cell applications that show excellent results and indicate that there are more than a few compounds which may be effcient at converting microbial bacteria into electricity. This form of passive power generation can be very useful in a number of municipal facilities

Wrighton and coworkers next set out to isolate a single member of the bacterial community growing on the anode so they could learn more about the biological processes governing external electron transfer. From a scraping of the anode, they developed a pure culture of a strain of Thermincola bacteria they dubbed "JR." Strain JR produced more current than any organism previously studied in traditional MFCs. A Thermincola genome project is underway that will allow Wrighton and coworkers to look for clues as to which genes make external electron transfer possible. Once determined, the molecular details of the cell-to-anode electron transfer could guide improvements in the design of anode materials that are better suited for MFCs.

Strain JR is the first member of its phylum we know to be capable of directly transferring electrons to an anode. Given that strain JR is so proficient at converting organic materials into electricity, this certainly suggests that there may be a number of other bacteria not only capable of this electrical alchemy, but perhaps even more adept. --Berkeley Science Review