In a groundbreaking development, researchers have successfully “hacked” the initial stages of photosynthesis – the natural process that fuels the majority of life on Earth. By uncovering new techniques to extract energy from this process, the findings could potentially pave the way for generating clean fuel and renewable energy solutions in the future.
“We didn’t know as much about photosynthesis as we thought we did, and the new electron transfer pathway we found here is completely surprising,” said Dr. Jenny Zhang from Cambridge’s Yusuf Hamied Department of Chemistry, who coordinated the research. An international team of scientists studied photosynthesis in live cells at an ultrafast timescale of a millionth of a millionth of a second. Despite being extensively researched, photosynthesis still harbors undiscovered secrets. By employing ultrafast spectroscopic techniques, the team discovered that chemicals extract electrons from the molecular structures involved in photosynthesis at much earlier stages than previously believed.
“The physics of photosynthesis is seriously impressive,” said co-first author Tomi Baikie, from Cambridge’s Cavendish Laboratory “Normally, we work on highly ordered materials, but observing charge transport through cells opens up remarkable opportunities for new discoveries on how nature operates.” “Many scientists have tried to extract electrons from an earlier point in photosynthesis, but said it wasn’t possible because the energy is so buried in the protein scaffold,” said Zhang. “The fact that we can steal them at an earlier process is mind-blowing. At first, we thought we’d made a mistake: it took a while for us to convince ourselves that we’d done it.”