Increasing efforts have been devoted to enhancing the cathode activity towards oxygen reduction and improve power generation of air breathing microbial fuel cells. Exploring non-precious metal and highly active cathodic catalyst plays a key role in improving cathode performance. Our work aims to investigate the electrocatalyst behavior and power output of the single-chamber MFC equipped with carbon nanotubes hybridized molybdenum disulfide nanocomposites (CNT/MoS2) cathode. MoS2 nanosheets embedded into the CNTs network structure is synthesized by a facile hydrothermal method. The CNT/MoS2-MFC achieves a maximum power density of 53.0 mW m(-2), which is much higher than those MFCs with pure CNTs (21.4 mW m(-2)) or solely MoS2 (14.4 mW m(-2)) cathode. The oxygen reduction reaction (ORR) test also demonstrates a promoted electrocatalytic activity of synthesized material, which may be attributed to the special interlaced structure and abundant oxygen chemisorption sites of CNT/MoS2. Such CNTs-based noble-metal-free catalyst presents a new approach to the application of MFCs cathode materials. (C) 2019 Hydrogen Energy Publications LLC. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.