A Disposable, Papertronic Three-Electrode Potentiostat for Monitoring Bacterial Electrochemical Activity

Bacterial electrochemical activities can promote sustainable energy and environmental engineering applications. Characterizing their ability is critical for effectively adopting these technologies. Conventional studies of the electroactive bacteria are limited to insensitive, time-consuming, and labor-intensive two-electrode microbial fuel cell (MFC) techniques. Even the latest miniaturized MFC array is limited by irreproducibility and uncontrollability. In this work, we created a 4-well electrochemical sensing array with an integrated, custom-made three-electrode potentiostat to provide a controllable analytic capability without unwanted perturbations. A simple potentiostat circuit used two operational amplifiers and one resistor, allowing chronoamperometric and staircase voltammetric analyses of three well-known electroactive bacteria species: Shewanella oneidensis MR1, Pseudomonas aeruginosa PAO1, and Bacillus subtilis. Portability and disposability were emphasized by integrating all the functions into a paper substrate, which makes analyses possible at the point-of-use and in resource-limited settings without a bulky and expensive benchtop potentiostat. After use, the papertronic system was disposed of safely by incineration without posing any bacterial cytotoxic risks. This novel sensing platform creates an inexpensive, scalable, time-saving, high-performance, and user-friendly platform that facilitates the study of fundamental electrocatalytic activities of bacteria.