Call for Papers

Please contact the symposium organizers with questions.

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.

Topics will include:

• Bioelectronic interfaces
• Electronic signal propagation in bacterial communities
• Biohybrid sensors
• Power generation in living microbial-based materials
• Bio(micro)electronic devices
• Novel bioelectrochemical living composite materials

Invited Speakers (tentative):

• Caroline Ajo-Franklin (Rice University, USA)
• Herdeline Ann M. Ardoña (University of California, Irvine, USA)
• Munehiro Asally (The University of Warwick, United Kingdom)
• William E. Bentley (University of Maryland, USA)
• Gianluca Farinola (Università di Bari, Italy)
• Sarah M. Glaven (U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, USA)
• Jeff Hasty (University of California, San Diego, USA)
• Anna Herland (KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden)
• Sahika Inal (King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, Saudi Arabia)
• Guglielmo Lanzani (Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, Italy)
• Derek Lovley (University of Massachusetts Amherst, USA)
• Michel M. Maharbiz (University of California, Berkeley, USA)
• Shelley Minteer (The University of Utah, USA)
• Christine K. Payne (Duke University, USA)
• Ann Rajnicek (University of Aberdeen, United Kingdom)
• Gemma Reguera (Michigan State University, USA)
• Leonard M. Tender (U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, USA)
• Jun Yao (University of Massachusetts Amherst, USA)

Symposium Organizers