ANNOUNCEMENTS
Rising demand of water and limited fresh water sources made it imperative to treat and recycle discharged water streams both from an environmental and sustainability perspective. Bioelectrochemical system (BES) is one such technology for treating wastewater streams, and additionally useful for electrosynthesis of value-added products from discarded waste suspended in water streams. The key hypothesis of the present study was to check if the metabolic flexibility of sulphate reducing bacteria (SRB) capable of reduction of sulphate to sulphides can be replaced by reduction of organics to value added products using SRB based biocathode in BES. Screening of 62 samples collected from different sites across India was performed. A robust, electroactive SRB based consortium, TERI-MS-003 was developed and characterized using fluorescent in situ hybridization and 16S rDNA sequencing procedure. A series of experiments were performed to intensively study the biocathode capabilities and metabolic route of the electroactive biocathode developed using TERI-MS-003. High cathodic current densities were successfully achieved for driving bioelectrochemical conversions. It becomes essential to select the correct electrode material for development of robust biocathodes. For this, seven different carbon based electrode materials were comparatively evaluated for their physicochemical and bioelectrochemical response. Two electrode materials were shortlisted to further tune the operational conditions of the BES by studying the impact of altering selected operational parameters on the performance of the cell. SRB based biocathode was found to bioelectrochemically synthesise value added products as well help in the treatment of wastewater streams successfully.
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