Over-expressing NadA quinolinate synthase in Escherichia coli enhances the bioelectrochemistry in microbial fuel cell.

Microbial Fuel Cell (MFC) which converts biomass energy into electricity through microbial metabolism, is one of the important technologies for energy reserves. The low power production efficiency limits the development of MFC. One possible method to solve this problem is to genetically modify the microbial metabolism pathways to enhance the efficiency of MFC. In this study, we over-expressed the nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide A quinolinate synthase gene (nadA) in order to increase the NADH/+ level in Escherichia coli (E. coli) to obtain a new electrochemically active bacteria strain. Following experiments showed an enhanced performance of the MFC, including increased peak voltage output (70.81 mV) and power density (0.29 µW/cm2), which increased by 361% and 20.83% compared to the control group, respectively. These data suggest that genetic modification of electricity producing microbial could be a potential way to improve the MFC performance.