Plants have been harnessing the sun’s energy for hundreds of millions of years.
Plants have been harnessing the sun’s energy for hundreds of millions of years.
Algae and photosynthetic bacteria have been doing the same for even longer, all with remarkable efficiency and resiliency.
It’s no wonder, then, that scientists have long sought to understand exactly how they do this, hoping to use this knowledge to improve human-made devices such as solar panels and sensors.
“We have a tremendous opportunity here to open up completely new disciplines of light-driven biochemical reactions, ones that haven’t been envisioned by nature. If we can do that, that’s huge.” — Argonne biophysicist Philip Laible
Scientists from the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory, working closely with collaborators at Washington University in St. Louis, recently solved a critical part of this age-old mystery, homing in on the initial, ultrafast events through which photosynthetic proteins capture light and use it to initiate a series of electron transfer reactions.
Read more at DOE / Argonne National Laboratory
Image by jarekgrafik from Pixabay
