Bioelectrochemical phenomena occurring in planktonic and biofilm-based microbial communities can be exploited to build up innovative biohybrid composite materials that can carry out tasks otherwise unattainable by the separated components alone. For instance, the ability of certain prokaryotes to interact with charged electrodes, i.e. acting as electron acceptor/donor species, can be used for power generation, wastewater remediation and for the electrosynthesis of useful chemicals. Bioelectricity can be also taken as a biophysical indicator of bacterial physiology (i.e. through chemotaxis), thus enabling the development of new biohybrid sensing platforms. Such living materials may be applied to monitoring and/or modulating electronic communication within microbial communities, with the aim of developing new microelectronic technologies capable of recreating and controlling metabolic pathways on a chip. The scope of this highly interdisciplinary symposium is to provide a venue for open discussion on the field of bioelectricity in living microbial-based materials and encompasses materials science, chemistry, electronics, electrophysiology and biology. In particular, the symposium aims to cover the bridge between different scientific approaches in this field, to overcome existing challenges, and to enable the development of next-generation biohybrid materials and devices.

bioelectronic biofilm biological biological synthesis (assembly) biomaterial energy generation recovery