A microfabricated microbial fuel cell array for high throughput screening (HTS) of electricity generating microbes from environment

This paper presents the development of a microfabricated microbial fuel cell (MFC) array for screening microbes capable of direct electricity generation. The compact and user-friendly platform enables direct characterization and comparison of electrochemically active microbes in parallel. The MFC array consists of 24 independent miniature MFCs on a single 5×7.5 cm chip format, capable of 24 parallel analyses. A parallel screening of environmental microbes using the MFC array identified an isolate displaying 233% higher power than the S. oneidensis MR-1 reference strain. This result was validated using a conventional MFC.