In what could be claimed a major breakthrough, scientists have produced sugar from solar energy, using plant, bacterial, frog and fungal enzymes.
A team at Cincinnati University has focused its work on making an artificial photosynthetic material, which uses plant, frog, fungal enzymes and bacterial, trapped within a foam housing, to make sugar from sunlight and carbon dioxide.
According to the scientists, foam was chosen because it can effectively concentrate the reactants but allow very good light and air penetration.
The design was based on the foam nests of a semi-tropical frog called the Tungara frog, which creates very long-lived foams for its developing tadpoles.
"The advantage for our system compared to plants and algae is that all of the captured solar energy is converted to sugars, whereas these organisms must divert a great deal of energy to other functions to maintain life and reproduce.
"Our foam also uses no soil, so food production would not be interrupted, and it can be used in highly enriched carbon dioxide environments, like exhaust from coal-burning power plants, unlike many natural photosynthetic systems.
"In natural plant systems, too much carbon dioxide shuts down photosynthesis, but ours does not have this limitation due to the bacterial-based photo-capture strategy," Professor David Wendell, who led the team, said.
There are many benefits to being able to create a plant-like foam. "You can convert the sugars into many different things, including ethanol and other biofuels. And it removes carbon dioxide from the air, but maintains current arable land for food production," Wendell said.
Added team member Dean Montemagno: "This technology establishes an economical way of harnessing the physiology of living systems by creating a new generation of functional materials that intrinsically incorporates life processes into its structure.
"Specifically in this work it presents a new pathway of harvesting solar energy to produce either oil or food with efficiencies that exceed other biosolar production methods. More broadly it establishes a mechanism for incorporating the functionality found in living systems into systems that we engineer and build."
The findings have been published in the 'Nano Letters' journal.
