The researchers obtained energy through semi-artificial photosynthesis, a process by which water in plants is broken down into hydrogen and oxygen. The new method allowed them to increase the amount of energy they produced.
Biologists have found a new way to use solar energy for good purposes. By changing the mechanism of photosynthesis in plants, they learned to split water into hydrogen and oxygen, while releasing energy. An article about this was published in Nature Energy.
Photosynthesis is itself the process of "converting" sunlight into energy, which plants use. Oxygen is a by-product of the decomposition of water absorbed by the plant. Perhaps photosynthesis is the most important reaction for all life on Earth, since it produces almost all the oxygen in the planet's atmosphere. Hydrogen, which is also formed during the splitting of water during photosynthesis, has the potential to be an environmentally friendly and inexhaustible source of energy.
A team of researchers led by academics from St. John's College at Cambridge University used sunlight to break down water into hydrogen and oxygen during a process of artificial photosynthesis, which scientists have corrected with biological components and new technologies. With this method, the plants absorb more sunlight than usual.
“Natural photosynthesis is ineffective, since it developed solely for the survival of plants, so it provides the minimum required energy - only 1-2% of what it can potentially give out,” commented one of the authors of the work Katarzyna Sokol.
Artificial photosynthesis has been around for many decades, but it has never been successfully used to create renewable energy, since it is based on the action of expensive and toxic catalysts. For the same reason, no one tried to use it at an industrial level.
An experimental setup in which the process of semi-artificial photosytesis was carried out.
The Cambridge study is part of a large-scale effort to improve semi-artificial photosynthesis with the goal of moving towards fully artificial photosynthesis using enzymes.
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A team of researchers led by Sokol not only was able to increase the amount of produced and stored energy, but also activated the process of photosynthesis in algae, which has been inactive for millennia.
“Hydrogenase is an enzyme found in algae that can reduce the number of protons in hydrogen. In the course of evolution, its production in algae was deactivated, since it was not required for survival. We were able to overcome this limitation and achieve the desired reaction - splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen,”Sokol explained.
The researcher hopes that the technique developed by her group will be applied to innovative systems for converting solar energy. It is the first model to successfully use hydrogenase and photosystems for a process of semi-artificial photosynthesis triggered entirely by sunlight.
Two years ago, a real breakthrough in this area was the creation of a device for artificial photosynthesis by scientists from the Julich Research Center. The working prototype of the device was a small self-contained unit with a working surface area of only 64 square centimeters.
Ksenia Murasheva