Over-expressing NadA quinolinate synthase in Escherichia coli enhances the bioelectrochemistry in microbial fuel cells

Abstract

The microbial fuel cell (MFC), which converts biomass energy into electricity through microbial metabolism, is one of the important devices for generating new bioenergy. However, low power production efficiency limits the development of MFCs. One possible method to solve this problem is to genetically modify the microbial metabolism pathways to enhance the efficiency of MFCs. In this study, we over-expressed the nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide A quinolinate synthase gene (nadA) in order to increase the NADH/+ level in Escherichia coli and obtain a new electrochemically active bacteria strain. The following experiments showed an enhanced performance of the MFC, including increased peak voltage output (70.81 mV) and power density (0.29 μW/cm2), which increased by 361% and 20.83% compared to the control group, respectively. These data suggest that genetic modification of electricity producing microbes could be a potential way to improve MFC performance.