Key Photosynthesis Step Replicated

[agent46]

Key Photosynthesis Step Replicated
ScienceDaily (Aug. 18, 2008)

An international team of researchers led by Monash University has used chemicals found in plants to replicate a key process in photosynthesis paving the way to a new approach that uses sunlight to split water into hydrogen and oxygen.

The breakthrough could revolutionise the renewable energy industry by making hydrogen – touted as the clean, green fuel of the future – cheaper and easier to produce on a commercial scale.

Professor Leone Spiccia, Mr Robin Brimblecombe and Dr Annette Koo from Monash University teamed with Dr Gerhard Swiegers at the CSIRO and Professor Charles Dismukes at Princeton University to develop a system comprising a coating that can be impregnated with a form of manganese, a chemical essential to sustaining photosynthesis in plant life.

"We have copied nature, taking the elements and mechanisms found in plant life that have evolved over 3 billion years and recreated one of those processes in the laboratory," Professor Spiccia said.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/08/080817223544.htm

The study of nature's elegant processes promise untold breakthroughs and insights in every form of human endeavor - not least of which is "technology" as we think of it. How unfathomably stupid is it that we have allowed ourselves to reach such a scale of environmental disaster as we have? How much opportunity to learn and model from nature have we already lost, I wonder.

[mike_c]

1. it's always seemed to me that a better approach would be...

...to incorporate the genes for enough of photosystem II into non-photosynthetic bacterial membranes, but rather than reducing plastoquinone, or maybe afterwards, transferring the acquired protons to some other enzyme that stays away from the electron transport chain AND catalyzes the formation of diatomic H₂ gas. Grown in sunlight in aqueous media with an exogenous carbohydrate source, those bacteria would split water all day long!