Queueing theory as a modeling tool for bacterial interaction: Implications for microbial fuel cells

Microbial communities play a significant role in bioremediation, plant growth promotion, human and animal digestion, drive elemental cycles, the carbon-cycle and cleaning water. They are also posed to be the engines of renewable energy via microbial fuel cells which can reverse the process of electrosynthesis. While the diffusion of chemical signals in the surrounding medium of biological systems has been heavily studied, the electron transfer mechanism occurring in living cells and its role in cell-cell interaction is less understood. Recent experimental observations open up new frontiers in the design of electron-based communication and energy networks in microbial communities, which may coexist with the more well-known interaction strategies based on molecular diffusion. In this position paper, a series of modeling strategies is proposed, informed by experiment, to describe the large-scale interaction of bacterial communities. A new queueing theoretic model for the internal workings of a bacterium is described as well as methods based on statistical physics to scale up the queuing models. The goal is to couple modeling with experiment to optimize the design of microbial fuel cells.