Everything you have ever eaten, or will ever eat, can ultimately be traced back to an organism carrying out photosynthesis. The oldest known fossils are those of cyanobacteria, microscopic organisms that 3.5 billion years ago evolved the ability to turn water, carbon dioxide and sunlight into sugar, which fuels all cellular life. Cyanobacteria eventually gave rise to the ancestor of plants.Today those remnant cyanobacteria are known as chloroplasts.
The first step in photosynthesis uses the energy of sunlight to break a water molecule into its basic parts; an atom of oxygen and two atoms of hydrogen. The hydrogen protons are stripped away from a water molecule and two atoms of oxygen are joined together released as a ‘waste product’.
As positively charged protons accumulate on one side of a membrane a sort of chemical battery is created, the power of which is then used to generate the energy-rich molecule ATP which in turn is used to fix CO2 into the sugars that feed almost all life on the planet.
Now researchers at the University of Georgia have figured out a way to tap into these most ancient of power plants. By coupling the isolated chloroplast membranes from a spinach plant onto carbon nanotubes Ramaraja Ramasamy and colleagues have succeeded in generating a small electrical current when light strikes the sample. This is different from generating electricity by recombining the hydrogen and oxygen atoms from a split molecule of water – used in fuel cells.
Dr. Ramasamy’s device generates electricity directly from the plant material itself. What he developed was a way to interrupt photosynthesis to capture the electrons before the plant uses them to make these sugars. Powering our nation’s cities and factories from plant chloroplasts is not something that is going to happen anytime soon but in the near future this technology may enable power generation in remote or isolated places in which even a small amount of electricity is enough to make a difference.
The first step in photosynthesis uses the energy of sunlight to break a water molecule into its basic parts; an atom of oxygen and two atoms of hydrogen. The hydrogen protons are stripped away from a water molecule and two atoms of oxygen are joined together released as a ‘waste product’.
As positively charged protons accumulate on one side of a membrane a sort of chemical battery is created, the power of which is then used to generate the energy-rich molecule ATP which in turn is used to fix CO2 into the sugars that feed almost all life on the planet.
Now researchers at the University of Georgia have figured out a way to tap into these most ancient of power plants. By coupling the isolated chloroplast membranes from a spinach plant onto carbon nanotubes Ramaraja Ramasamy and colleagues have succeeded in generating a small electrical current when light strikes the sample. This is different from generating electricity by recombining the hydrogen and oxygen atoms from a split molecule of water – used in fuel cells.
Dr. Ramasamy’s device generates electricity directly from the plant material itself. What he developed was a way to interrupt photosynthesis to capture the electrons before the plant uses them to make these sugars. Powering our nation’s cities and factories from plant chloroplasts is not something that is going to happen anytime soon but in the near future this technology may enable power generation in remote or isolated places in which even a small amount of electricity is enough to make a difference.
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