Microbial electrochemical systems research

Since then the investigations of microbial systems were continued and extended to the electrochemical and electronic behavior of plant and mammalian tissues. Therefore, now one can say that we are really in the midst of it all. Undoubtedly life might sometimes appear simpler if research activities were restricted to isolated biochemical systems incorporated into artificial membranes. Unfortunately it is almost impossible to extrapolate these findings... 

In this section, we discuss in detail how the selection of various experimental parameters affects each of these conditions. One of the first studies on EIS measurements in MXC applications by Strik et al. [29] covers some of these conditions very well, but we provide an expanded explanation here. While all these conditions are especially difficult to fulfill in a typical electrochemical cell, the conditions used in MXCs further exacerbate the problem. For example, it is known that polarization curves for microbial anodes exhibit nonlinear, Nernstian responses [30]. Thus, there are regions in the polarization curve where the system may not behave linearly even when small amplitudes are applied. The irreversibility of the enzymatic responses also leads to regions where finiteness is not met (Fig. 8.6). These cases would run also into difficulties in terms of the signal-to-noise ratio when small amplitudes are applied at potentials on the saturation region of the polarization curve. Similarly, as MXCs are biological reactors and can have changes in microbial responses due to small perturbations outside the conttol of researchers, conditions of both stability and causality are difficult to fulfill. 

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