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Looking Inside a Biofilm: Microprofiling with Miniaturized Sensors Biofilms and microbial granules are highly structured microbial communities in which microorganisms experience very different chemical conditions over distances of only a few hundred micrometres. Oxygen, pH and electrical potential can change dramatically from the outer surface toward the interior of a granule, reflecting the combined activity of different microbial populations and their metabolic processes. T

Anammox granules are a cornerstone of energy-efficient nitrogen removal in wastewater treatment. They are typically conceptualized as diffusion-limited microbial aggregates in which solute transport occurs exclusively through molecular diffusion. In our recent work, we demonstrate that this assumption is incomplete. We provide the first experimental evidence for the existence of strong electric fields within anammox granules and show that these fields play a critical role in