Isolation and assessment of fungi derived from wastewater for sustainable energy generation.
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75% confidenceThis MFC study investigates Electrogens, MFC, Microgens. The research focuses on system optimization and characterization.
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Abstract
Urbanization has intensified the demand for different sustainable energy-generating solutions. One promising approach is the treatment of wastewater using electrochemical setups. A microbial fuel cell (MFC), an electrochemical setup, can be highly effective for wastewater treatment as it simultaneously generates bioelectricity. This study focuses on the isolation, characterization, and evaluation of electrogenic fungal species from wastewater samples (WWS) collected from the Uttarakhand region. Using the potentiostat, an electrochemical workstation, we screened a total of 70 different fungal isolates and identified 10 distinct fungal strains as potent current generators. Morphological characterization of these strains revealed several fungal structures, including hyphae and spores. The most potent fungi were further analyzed based on Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) amplification and genomic sequencing of the internal transcribed spacer (ITS) region. The obtained sequences were subjected to Basic Local Alignment Search Tool (BLAST) analysis, and the corresponding fungal isolates were assigned genus names after comparison with representative sequences available in GeneBank. ITS sequencing for the top three potent fungi revealed their highest resemblance to Aspergillus flavus (99.09%), Diaporthe caryae isolate KM 19 (96.18%), and Montagnula donacina (100.00%). Among these, the strain closely related to Aspergillus flavus demonstrated the highest current output. This isolate has been successfully submitted to the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) database under the accession number PX226319. The selected strain will be integrated into a dual-chambered microbial fuel cell (DC-MFC) system to evaluate its bioelectric performance under optimized conditions. Overall, this research established a foundation for identifying the potent fungal strains from local microbial communities present in wastewater for sustainable energy production.