More Biomimicry - Photosynthesis Mimics

Well, since my last article got such rave reviews, I figure I'll post on another one of the topics in Biomimicry, namely photosynthesis mimics.

Admittedly, photovoltaic cells have been around for a while now. And also admittedly, they haven't been doing all that much good. Mainly due to their inefficiency and high prices, I doubt that photovoltaics will be the energy wave of the future.

Plus, silicon isn't the way to go. If it were, evolution would have chosen it in the great "Natural Selection Game." But nature didn't. It chose carbon. So, therefore, if we're going to make a blueprint for the most energy efficient, cleanest, and coolest technology to run off of light, carbon is the winner.

Anyone who has Mr. Hagan for Biology knows that he talks to his plants (that's an in class joke. He's not really crazy, it's a figure of speech), and he's told us time and time again that if the plants could tell him how photosynthesis works (and I mean really works, not just how it happens), he'd be a very rich man. Well, scientists accross the world have been asking that very same question, and they've discovered extraordinary results.

For example, a team of scientists at Arizone State University have been working on setting up something similar to the Photosystems found in plants. So far, they've successfully mimicked the system with a pentad (a system made up of 5 proteins) that can nearly match the efficiency of plants. Another team of scientists, led by James Guillet at University of Toronto, have been working on how to get the energy into the system by mimicking the antenna-like objects found on the membranes of choroplast. He, too, has gotten the system to nature-like efficiency with a 95% absorption of light.

All of this is exciting by itself, but what makes it even more astounding are the applications. One of the most obvious is to make organic compounds from scratch, using only light and basic organic materials. If you could set up a mimicked photosystem and put it in the right sort of water based solution, there's not reason it couldn't put together many of the plastics we use today, without all the oil and toxic chemicals we're currently using. Nature has been making things for billions of years with just carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, and a few other elements. After thousands of years of industry, we're finally catching up.

Photo-mimicks could also produce hydrogen in a cheap, efficient, and clean manner. In the process of photosynthesis, hydrogen ions are naturally made due to electron holes in the sequence. Plants then use an enzyme, called (as always ever so originally) hydrogenase, to combine the ions and form hydrogen gas. This gas, once harvested, could easily power hydrogen fuel cells. Such fuel cells aren't quite in the affordable range today, but with further development, they're getting there. But once they do become affordable, the next problem to solve is the availability of cheap, easy to produce hyrdogen. With photosynthesis based technology, hydrogen could be made with just water, these photosynthesis sites, and some sunlight.

And of course, you could make little ATP powered enzymes that can go around doing jobs that are normally "up the sliding board."

All of this from a simple study of natural system.

Obviously, the application of most of these ideas are still in the development phase. The fact that Biomimicry was written in 1997, and few to none of these advancements have reached consumers, speaks to the difficulty inherent in this field. But considering the possibilites, especially in a world that's running out of petroleum, such difficulties seem more like a challenge than a curse. Since the dawn of civilization, we've only been burning in order to build; it's about time we learned from our neighors, the plants, about how to build, without the uneccesary steps inbetween.

Exciting. For me at least. I could definitely see this being a field I'd want to go into. But I haven't found any that are physics based yet. So far, they've all been biochem. Where's the biophysics?