Electroactive Microbes for Circular Bioeconomy and Environmental Remediation

Electroactive microbes have emerged as key players at the interface of biology, chemistry, and engineering due to their ability to exchange electrons directly with solid electrodes, conductive materials, or minerals. This trait enables them to drive redox reactions that degrade environmental pollutants and convert waste streams into energy and valuable bioproducts. In recent years, the integration of electroactive microbes into microbial fuel cells, microbial electrolysis cells, and electrosynthesis platforms has opened new pathways toward sustainable bioremediation, energy recovery, and resource recycling. As global priorities shift toward circularity and carbon neutrality, understanding and harnessing these microbial processes has become increasingly important.Addressing these challenges requires interdisciplinary collaboration among microbiologists, materials scientists, chemical engineers, and environmental technologists. This collection aims to bring together cutting-edge research that clarifies how electroactive microbial communities assemble and function, how extracellular electron transfer (EET) pathways are regulated, and how these mechanisms can be tuned through electrode design, reactor configuration, or synthetic biology. By emphasizing both fundamental insight and application-driven studies, we aim to highlight electroactive microbes as adaptable platforms for circular resource management, pollution control, and low-carbon product formation.This Research Topic welcomes contributions that advance fundamental understanding and applied innovations in electroactive microbial systems. Areas of interest include: • Mechanisms of extracellular electron transfer, redox metabolism, and biofilm development in electroactive communities, including their regulation and environmental adaptation; • Waste-to-energy and waste-to-chemical conversion driven by electroactive microorganisms; • Microbial electrosynthesis and CO₂ utilization, including pathways for carbon fixation and reductive biotransformations; • Environmental bioremediation and pollutant transformation using electroactive microbes or bioelectrochemical approaches; • Synthetic biology, metabolic engineering, and adaptive evolution strategies to enhance or rewire microbial electroactivity.We invite Original Research articles, Reviews, Perspectives, and Methods that offer novel insights or integrative overviews. Through this collection, we aim to showcase the potential of electroactive microbes as catalysts for sustainable technologies and circular resource management.Please note that Microbiotechnology does not consider descriptive studies that are solely based on amplicon (e.g., 16S rRNA) profiles or comparisons of nucleic acid extracts (e.g., metagenomics), unless they are accompanied by a clear hypothesis and experimentation and provide insight into the microbiological system or process being studied. Topic editors: Matteo Tucci, Amelia-Elena Rotaru Source: https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/75898/electroactive-microbes-for-circular-bioeconomy-and-environmental-remediation