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News Release 11-060
NSF Announces New Awards That Will Investigate More Efficient Ways to Harvest Sunlight to Make New Biofuels and Biomaterials
Researchers used an "Ideas Lab" to generate potentially transformative projects and stimulate new approaches to a long-standing scientific problem
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Top scientists from the United States and the United Kingdom are jointly working to pioneer new ways to improve the efficiency of photosynthesis.
Credit: © 2011 Jupiterimages Corporation
In photosynthesis, solar energy is captured and used to produce chemical fuel by a photosynthetic organism. This project is designed to improve the efficiency of this capture and conversion by: 1) separating them into two types of cells: one that captures solar energy and another "factory" cell that produces fuel; and 2) enabling these two different types of cells to communicate with one another via the flow of electrical currents between them. Compartmentalizing the processes of energy capture and fuel production into two different types of cells will allow researchers to optimize environments for each process, and thereby improve the efficiency of each process.
Credit: Zina Deretsky, NSF
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EPP will engineer into cells protein structures that reduce photorespiration and boost photosynthesis.
Credit: Elizabeth Yendrek, Melissa Edwards and Steve Long, University of Illinois; and Seth Axen and Cheryl Kerfeld, UC-Berkeley.
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The CAPP project will characterize the photosynthetic-boosting pyrenoid (arrow) captured by phase contrast microscopy.
Credit: Moritz Meyer, University of Cambridge
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