Abstract
The release of antibiotics into aquatic environments has made the treatment of wastewater containing antibiotics a world-wide public health problem. The ability of microbial fuel cells (MFCs) to harvest electricity from organic waste and renewable biomass is attracting increased interest in wastewater treatment. In this paper we investigated the bioelectrochemical response of an electroactive mixed-culture biofilm in MFC to different tobramycin concentrations. The electroactive biofilms showed a high degree of robustness against tobramycin at the level of μg/L. The current generation responses of the biofilms were affected by the presence of tobramycin. The inhibition ratio of the MFC increased exponentially with the tobramycin concentrations in the range of 0.1-1.9 g/L. The bacterial communities of the biofilms vary with the concentrations of tobramycin, the equilibrium of which is critical for the stability of electroactive biofilms based-MFC. Experimental results demonstrate that the electroactive biofilm-based MFC is robust against antibiotics at the level of μg/L, but sensitive to changes in antibiotic concentration at the level of g/L. These results could provide significant information about the effects of antibiotics on the performance MFC as a waste-treatment technology.
Highlights
The release of antibiotics into aquatic environments has made the treatment of wastewater containing antibiotics a world-wide public health problem
Obvious inhibitions were observed in the microbial fuel cells (MFCs) with tobramycin concentration of 2 mM at batch 3 and the MFC showed significant inhibition as the concentration increased to 4 mM
For the MFCs with tobramycin concentrations of 2 and 4 mM, current recovered 4 and 6 batches post antibiotic addition. These results suggested that some microbial species in the biofilm directly or indirectly facilitating current generation in the biofilm could be recovered from those community members who were not killed by the given antibiotic dose and exposure time, reflected by the recovering stable current for a few batches
Summary
The release of antibiotics into aquatic environments has made the treatment of wastewater containing antibiotics a world-wide public health problem. The ability of microbial fuel cells (MFCs) to harvest electricity from organic waste and renewable biomass is attracting increased interest in wastewater treatment. The release of antibiotics to the aquatic environment as well as its related environmental issues and public health problems have attracted great attention. Microbial fuel cell (MFC) as a device capable of harvesting electricity from organic waste and renewable biomass, has attracted great interest for wastewater treatment [5]. The question that is still largely unaddressed is the effect of the toxins on the performance of electroactive biofilms-based MFC accomplishing removal of COD in pharmaceutical wastewater treatment
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