A 1.5 micro-liter microbial fuel cell array for rapid screening of exoelectrogenic bacteria

Abstract

We report an array of six MEMS microbial fuel cells (MFCs), a compact and reliable platform for rapid screening of exoelectrogenic bacteria. The presented device contains vertically stacked 1.5 μL anode/cathode chambers separated by a proton exchange membrane (PEM), and represents the smallest MEMS MFC array. Within just five hours, we successfully determined the electricity generation capacity of two known bacterial electrogens and another metabolically more voracious organism with 4 isogenic mutants of this strain constructed with the hypothesis that such mutations could alter their electrogenic properties. In addition, the percent deviation of all six MFC units was less than 1.4% from their open circuit voltages recorded, which is far less than that of mL-sized MFC arrays and even MEMS MFC arrays.