Biosensing Applications of Microbial Fuel Cell

Abstract With the present day rising challenges of providing access to clean drinking water to the masses, it is becoming imperative to develop faster and accurate means of determining and monitoring the water quality. The traditional methods of measuring the organic load in water are lengthy, cumbersome, and prone to variations and therefore identification of a reliable, sensitive, and rapid method is imperative. Biosensors are one such alternative. However, requirement of an external power source limits their usage for remote location biosensing. In view of this, microbial fuel cells (MFCs) have recently drawn much attention as biosensing devices as the sensing and signal transduction steps in these devices are integrated. This eliminates requirement of any additional power source, thereby making MFCs fit for online, real-time, remote location sensing. This chapter discusses the design and application of MFCs as biosensor devices for water quality monitoring and other applications. In the end, a small section on micro MFCs as biosensors is also included.