A Century of Discovery
From Potter's 1911 experiments to today's systems, trace the remarkable journey of microbial electrochemistry.
Electricity from Microbial Decomposition
M.C. Potter
Measured a voltage between fermenting cultures of yeast or bacteria and a non-fermenting medium, using platinum electrodes.
Bacterial Half-Cells in Series
Barnett Cohen
Described the bacterial culture as an electrical half-cell and connected several such cells in series.
Direct Electrode Reaction of Shewanella
Byung Hong Kim & colleagues
Showed Shewanella putrefaciens is electrochemically active and can transfer electrons to an electrode without an added mediator — later established for Geobacter by Bond & Lovley (2003).
Sustained Electricity from a Sugar-Fed MFC
Swades Chaudhuri & Derek Lovley
Showed that Rhodoferax ferrireducens oxidises glucose to CO₂ and transfers the electrons to a graphite electrode with no mediator — a laboratory result, not a deployment.
Geobacter Genome Sequenced
B. A. Methé, D. R. Lovley & colleagues
Published the complete genome of Geobacter sulfurreducens (Methé et al., Science, 2003), giving the field a genetic map of a model electroactive organism.
Microbial Electrolysis Cells (MECs)
Liu, Grot & Logan (2005); Rozendal et al. (2006), independently
Showed that with an anoxic cathode, a small applied voltage added to the potential from microbial oxidation at the anode is enough to drive hydrogen evolution at the cathode — electrochemically assisted microbial hydrogen production.
Corpus-Scale Modelling of the MES Literature
MESSAI Platform
Structured parameter extraction across the published MES literature, feeding hierarchical Bayesian priors whose predictions carry credible intervals rather than point estimates.