Abiotic Glucose Research Articles

A membraneless single compartment abiotic glucose fuel cell

A simple energy harvesting strategy has been developed to selectively catalyze glucose in the presence of oxygen in a glucose/O2 fuel cell. The anode consists of an abiotic catalyst Al/Au/ZnO, in which ZnO seed layer was deposited on the surface of Al/Au substrate using hydrothermal method. The cathode is constructed from a single rod of platinum with an outer diameter of 500 μm. The abiotic glucose fuel cell was studied in phosphate buffer solution (pH 7.4) containing 5 mM glucose at a temperature of 22 °C. The cell is characterized according to its open-circuit voltage, polarization profile, and power density plot. Under these conditions, the abiotic glucose fuel cell possesses an open-circuit voltage of 840 mV and delivered a maximum power density of 16.2 μW cm−2 at a cell voltage of 495 mV. These characteristics are comparable to biofuel cell utilizing a much more complex system design. Such low-cost lightweight abiotic catalyzed glucose fuel cells have a great promise to be optimized, miniaturized to power bio-implantable devices.

Escherichia coil growth dynamics: A three‐pool biochemically based description

A three-pool growth model of an individual Escherichia coli cell is described herein. The model is based on a previously developed chemically structured complex single cell growth model. The reduction in model complexity and the identification of the essential modes of motion, over the time scale of growth, is achieved by temporal decomposition and analysis of hierarchy in relaxation times. The three-pool model faithfully simulates the changes in cell size, cell shape, cell macromolecular composition, DNA initiation and termination periods, and the dependence of cell growth under abiotic glucose limitation. The predictions made by the reduced model compare favorably with both the experimental data and those of the full single cell model (SCM) without any parameter adjustments. The three-pool model has very few significant parameters and has the potential to find immediate practical use in bioreactor design and process control strategies. The model development illustrates the use of modal analysis to yield reduced physiologically realistic dynamic model of complex microbial system such as E. coll.