ABSTRACT
Utilization of renewable resources to produce fuels and chemicals is increasing. Organic waste materials are renewable and can be used as an alternative resource for biofuel production. As interest has reached its apex in bio-electrochemistry, how bacteria transfer electrons to solid state electrodes and what benefits can be obtained from this bioelectrochemical system (BES) are the contemporary achievements of researchers to discover this technology, whose initial target was the conversion of both inorganic and organic types of waste into different energy products (Logan et al. 2006). Traditionally, BES is composed of an anode and a cathode that are separated by an ion exchange membrane (Du et al. 2008). Currently, BES applications have become evident, which include microbial desalination cells (MDCs), microbial fuel cells (MFCs), microbial solar cells (MSCs), and microbial electrosynthesis cells (MECs) (Bajracharya et al. 2016). Recently, researchers have concentrated on the microbial electrosynthesis cell’s (MEC’s) ability to diminish substrates into utilizable chemicals (Mohanakrishna et al. 2016). In MECs, without the utilization of land and chemicals, desired fuels can be manufactured in a direct and sustainable way. MFCs would attenuate not only the social demand on fossil fuels, but also reduce greenhouse effects (Rabaey et al. 2011). Over the past years, efforts have been focused for developing MECs into multiple platforms that can synthesize diverse fuels, such as acetate, butanol and butyrate (Zhang and Angelidaki 2014).
