ABSTRACT
To attain sustainable development and facilitate a circular bioeconomy, the processing of biofuels and other value-added materials from wastewater is the need of hour. The integration of the algal whole-cell with microbial fuel cells (MFC) will not only enhance the generation of electricity, efficiency of wastewater treatment but would also aid in reducing carbon footprint by carbon fixation via photosynthesis. While this technology also generates valuable algal biomass that can be converted to fuel or may act as source of other utilities. Algae may contribute to the organic feedstock role of MFC and enable microbial growth by helping to produce energy from anodic bacteria by supplying photosynthetic oxygen as a cathode electron acceptor while aiding in removal of Nitrogen and Phosphorus from effluent water. In algal-microbial fuel cell (A-MFC), the algae provide many benefits, such as photosynthetic oxygenation for the recycling of energy, CO2 fixation, processing of wastewater, etc. However, A-MFC efficiency depends on many operating parameters which includes material of electrode; thus, researchers have made tremendous collective efforts to identify optimum 444conditions to increase A-MFC performance. This review discusses recent advances in development of biocathodes used in MFC and A-MFC.
