One main obstacle for the development of microbial desalination cell (MDC) is that desalination rate decreases fast when salt concentration in the cell becomes low. To cover this shortage while using less energy to fulfill complete desalination, membrane capacitive deionization (MCDI) was used in this research as the downstream desalination process to further desalinate 1 g/L salt water. Single MDC, two MDCs in series and in parallel were used as the power supply to drive the MCDI, and the parallel-configuration system gave the best ECA of 264.8 mu mol/g, which was a 59% increase compared to that of driven by the potentiostat with the same operational voltage. The desalination rate of the MCDI was as high as 3.7 mg/h in one working cycle. MCDI proved to be an effective technology to combine with MDC for complete salt removal. (C) 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.