Artifical Photosynthesis Created With Help of Frog

University of Cincinnati researchers have made a breakthrough in efficiently converting carbon dioxide and sunlight into fuel.

It's a truly remarkable process: take plain old water, add some carbon dioxide and powered by clean solar energy, you end up with organic compounds available for use as food or fuel through a process whose primary waste product is oxygen. If it sounds too good to be true, perhaps its time to water your plants or enjoy a nice walk in the park among the trees, all of which live, grow and thrive by way of photosynthesis.

The simple-seeming function however has proved a tough nut to crack for farmers and scientists alike, who have long sought ways to maximize the efficiency of this sunlight-to-energy conversion mechanism in the field, or better still, to replicate it artificially. Researchers at The University of Cincinnati have published a study indicating that we're now on the brink of mimicking nature's way of producing energy.

And the breakthrough arrives, in part, thanks to a frog.

The Cincinnati team, whose study appears in the American Chemical Society's journal Nano Letters, were able to create a material that performs the energy-making job done by the chlorophyll in plants. The new photosynthetic material is a foam that contains a combination of enzymes derived from plants, bacteria, fungi, and from the Tungara frog (a small tropical species native to Central and South America). Foam offers the advantage of maximizing surface area available to both light and air, and the foam nests used by frogs to raise their young demonstrate excellent physical stability over time.

The innovation, astonishingly, appears to be even more efficient than nature itself, at least in terms of the amount of solar energy going in compared to the amount of energy contained by the output hydrocarbons. As the University of Cincinnati press release explains, actual plants are required to expend energy for reproduction and survival. The lab creation doesn't have such requirements, and accordingly can put all of the incoming solar energy work into making hydrocarbons.

Biomedical Engineering professor David Wendell offers explanation for the significance and potential of their find as they shift gears to explore the viability of large-scale application:

"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 the exhaust from coal-burning power plants, unlike many natural photosynthetic systems," adding the observation that "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."

With the establishment of this clean, green nanotechnology breakthrough, the research team is already looking ahead to exploring how chemical changes to the foam itself could result in a wider variety of hydrocarbons that are produced. And location is everything: the scientists see the application as a potentially beneficial end-of-pipe add-on to coal burning power plants whose carbon dioxide emissions would serve as feedstock to the innovative process.

Photo by Brian Gratwicke via Wikimedia Commons.