Microbial Fuel Cells as Effective Tools for Energy Recovery and Antibiotic Detection in Water and Food

Abstract

This work demonstrates that microbial fuel cells (MFCs), optimized for energy recovery, can be used as an effective tool to detect antibiotics in water-based environments. In MFCs, electroactive biofilms function as biocatalysts by converting the chemical energy of organic matter, which serves as the fuel, into electrical energy. The efficiency of the conversion process can be significantly affected by the presence of contaminants that act as toxicants to the biofilm. The present work demonstrates that MFCs can successfully detect antibiotic residues in water and water-based electrolytes containing complex carbon sources that may be associated with the food industry. Specifically, honey was selected as a model fuel to test the effectiveness of MFCs in detecting antibiotic contamination, and tetracycline was used as a reference antibiotic within this study. The results show that MFCs not only efficiently detect the presence of tetracycline in both acetate and honey-based electrolytes but also recover the same performance after each exposure cycle, proving to be a very robust and reliable technology for both biosensing and energy recovery.