The food source of sediment-ingesting animals is a subject of controversy, centering on the notion that the microbial biomass in sediments is insufficient to support caloric need. Gizzard shad Dorosoma cepedianum are omnivorous, sediment-ingesting fish that frequently impact the trophic structure of temperate lake and reservoir food webs. Prior gut content analyses of this fish have typically d...

Electrochemically active bacteria in a microbial fuel cell (MFC) usually exist as a biofilm attached to an electrode surface. Conventional cyclic voltammetry using potentiostat is considered as a powerful and reliable method to study electrochemical behavior of MFC biofilm. In this paper, we introduce a new approach to evaluate redox behavior of an electro-active MFC biofilm without using a pot...

The rapid development of synthetic biology enables the design, construction and optimization of synthetic microbial consortia to achieve specific functions. In China, the "973" project-"Design and Construction of Microbial Consortia" was funded by the National Basic Research Program of China in January 2014. It was proposed to address the fundamental challenges in engineering natural microbial ...

BACKGROUND The release of antibiotics into aquatic environments has made the treatment of wastewater containing antibiotics a world-wide public health problem. The ability of microbial fuel cells (MFCs) to harvest electricity from organic waste and renewable biomass is attracting increased interest in wastewater treatment. In this paper we investigated the bioelectrochemical response of an elec...

A method for assessing the performance of microbial fuel cells (MFCs) is the polarisation sweep where different external resistances are applied at set intervals (sample rates). The resulting power curves often exhibit an overshoot where both power and current decrease concomitantly. To investigate these phenomena, small-scale (1 mL volume) MFCs operated in continuous flow were subjected to pol...

Sandy surface sediments of tidal flats exhibit high microbial activity due to the fast and deep-reaching transport of oxygen and nutrients by porewater advection. On the other hand during low tide, limited transport results in nutrient and oxygen depletion concomitant to the accumulation of microbial metabolites. This study represents the first attempt to use flow-through reactors to investigat...

Effects of cathode types on the long-term stability of microbial fuel cell (MFC) and the anodic microbial communities were studied using K(3)Fe(CN)(6) catholyte (R1), air cathode (R2) and biocathode (R3) over a testing time of 400 d. Upon 400 d of testing, the maximum power densities (P(max)) of R1 and R2 decreased by 44% and 37%, and the Coulombic efficiencies (CEs) decreased 8.4% (R1) and 2.0...

For the development of long lasting portable microbial fuel cells (MFCs) new strategies are necessary to overcome critical issues such as hydraulic pump system and the biochemical substrate retrieval overtime to sustain bacteria metabolism. The present work proposes the use of a synthetic solid anolyte (SSA), constituted by agar, carbonaceous and nitrogen sources dissolved into diluted seawater...

Sediment microorganisms help create and maintain mangrove ecosystems. Although the changes in vegetation during mangrove forest succession have been well studied, the changes in the sediment microbial community during mangrove succession are poorly understood. To investigate the changes in the sediment microbial community during succession of mangroves at Zhanjiang, South China, we used phospho...