Department of Pharmaceutical Engineering, College of Life Sciences and Technology, Beijing University of Chemical Technology, Beijing 100029, China.
Biol Open. 2023 Mar 15;12(3). doi: 10.1242/bio.059554. Epub 2023 Mar 13.
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.
微生物燃料电池（MFC）通过微生物代谢将生物质能转化为电能，是产生新生物能源的重要装置之一。然而，低功率输出效率限制了 MFC 的发展。解决这个问题的一种可能方法是通过基因修饰微生物代谢途径来提高 MFC 的效率。在这项研究中，我们过表达了烟酰胺腺嘌呤二核苷酸 A 醌醇合酶基因（nadA），以增加大肠杆菌中的 NADH/+水平，并获得一种新的电化学活性细菌菌株。以下实验表明 MFC 的性能得到了增强，包括峰值电压输出（70.81 mV）和功率密度（0.29 μW/cm2）的提高，分别比对照组提高了 361%和 20.83%。这些数据表明，对产电微生物进行基因修饰可能是提高 MFC 性能的一种潜在方法。
