Photosystem II molecule, which plays a central role in photosynthesis |

Using ultrafast imaging of moving energy in photosynthesis, scientists have determined the speed of crucial processes for the first time. This will help scientists understand how nature has perfected the process of photosynthesis, and how this might be imitated to produce fuels by artificial photosynthesis.     Read More |

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Coral Walls 'Mesophotic Reefs' Reveal New Type of Photosynthesis |

Now, researchers have discovered that the corals that inhabit this "Mesophotic zone" have a never-before-seen adaptation that enables them to eke out enough light energy to survive. The photosynthetic algae that live on and power these corals have unusual cellular "machinery" that enables them to conduct photosynthesis more efficiently than species that live at shallower depths ...             READ MORE

Researchers discover feedback mechanism in photosynthesis that protects plants from damage by light |

This new knowledge could have important repercussions on the
quest to improve photosynthesis for more sustainable agriculture |

Textbook: Bicarbonate is formed when carbon dioxide dissolves in water, so its concentration
is related to the amount of carbon dioxide in the local environment. As well as low carbon dioxide levels causing electrons to build up and trigger the release of bicarbonate, the study also suggests the possibility that the level of carbon dioxide itself in the local leaf environment could
impact on the bicarbonate binding. "This is such an intuitive feedback mechanism at the heart of biology that I think it will go into school textbooks," said lead author, Professor Bill
Rutherford FRS from the Department of Life Sciences at Imperial.

"Now that we understand this new mechanism in the lab, the next step is to define when it kicks in out there in the field - not to mention the forest, greenhouse, plant pot, sea, lake and pond."

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There is intense interest in creating artificial photosynthesis as an alternative energy source |

Identification of a gene needed to expand light harvesting in photosynthesis into the far-red-light spectrum provides clues to the development of oxygen-producing photosynthesis, an evolutionary advance that changed the history of life on Earth. “Knowledge of how photosynthesis evolved could empower scientists to design better ways to use light energy for the benefit of humankind,” said Donald A. Bryant, the Ernest C. Pollard Professor of Biotechnology and professor of biochemistry and molecular biology at Penn State University and the leader of the research team that made the discovery.
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Artificial photosynthesis is considered a promising element of a sustainable future energy supply |

Chemists from the Universities of Basel and Zurich have come one step closer to generating energy from sunlight: for the first time, they were able to reproduce one of the crucial phases of natural photosynthesis with artificial molecules.

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In the quest for sustainable alternative energy and fuel sources |

Through photosynthesis, plants convert sunlight, water, and CO2 into sugars, multicarbon molecules that fuel cellular processes. CO2 is thus both the precursor

to the fossil fuels that are central to modern life as well as the by-product of burning those fuels. The ability to generate synthetic liquid fuels from stable, oxygenated carbon precursors such as CO2 and carbon monoxide (CO) is reminiscent of photosynthesis in nature and is a transformation that is desirable in artificial systems. In the quest for sustainable alternative energy and fuel sources, one viable solution may be the conversion of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide (CO2) into liquid fuels.

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Redesigning photosynthesis to sustainably meet global food and bioenergy demand |

Can scientists hack photosynthesis?   

The world’s crop productivity is stagnating whereas population growth, rising affluence, and mandates for biofuels put increasing demands on agriculture. Meanwhile, demand for increasing cropland competes with equally crucial global sustainability and environmental protection needs. Addressing this looming agricultural crisis will be one of our greatest scientific challenges in the coming decades ... Abstract
Full Text

Pulling carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere [artificial air capture] might not be prudent.

Effects of Changing the Carbon Cycle | The Earth Observatory:    

Terrestrial Uptake from the Atmosphere | University Corporation for Atmospheric Research: 

                                                    Photosynthesis Accelerated 

Closing in on the secrets of plant photosynthesis |

The new technique essentially has brought the picture into sharper focus. What the technicians see is a system in which "antenna" proteins capture light and feed them into a kind of molecular reactor. One difficulty with fully understanding the process is that, unlike the parts of a solar panel, which are rigid and designed to last, the crucial proteins in the photosystem of a plant are dynamic, and don't last very long before they fall apart. The plant then regenerates these structures. "Even though nature has had millions of years to develop and optimize photosynthesis, there are still outstanding and unknown questions about how photosynthesis operates. It's truly a scientific challenge."

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Photosynthesis has unique isotopic signature |

Photosynthesis leaves behind a unique calling card, a chemical signature that is spelled out with stable oxygen isotopes, according to a new study in Science. The findings suggest that similar isotopic signatures could exist for many biological processes, including some that are difficult to observe with current tools.

"We've found a new type of biosignature," said co-lead author Laurence Yeung, an assistant professor of Earth science at Rice University. "We show that plants and plankton impart this type of biosignature on the oxygen they produce during photosynthesis. "Yeung, who joined Rice in January, conducted the study with colleagues at the University of California, Los Angeles. Isotopes are versions of an element that differ in their atomic weights. For example, most oxygen atoms contain eight protons and eight neutrons and are represented by the symbol O-16. More than 99.9 percent of Earth's oxygen is O-16, but two heavier oxygen isotopes exist in trace amounts: O-17, which contains one extra neutron, and O-18, which has two extra.

"Looking at oxygen through the lens of clumped isotopes will give us a lot of new information about how oxygen is made and consumed by plants," said study co-lead author Jeanine Ash, a graduate student at UCLA. "I'm very excited about what this approach holds for the future." Read More | Isotopes of oxygen | There are three stable isotopes of oxygen that lead to oxygen (O)
having a standard atomic mass of 15.9994(3) u. Also 10 unstable isotopes have been characterized.
Using stable isotopic analysis, Laurence Yeung, Jeanine Ash, and Edward Young discovered that plants and plankton impart a unique biosignature on the oxygen they produce during photosynthesis. Credit: Doug Rumble Continue reading |

NASA finds good news on forests and carbon dioxide |

Forests and other land vegetation currently remove up to 30 percent of human carbon dioxide emissions from the atmosphere during photosynthesis. If the rate of absorption were to slow down, the rate of global warming would speed up in return. The new study is the first to devise a way to make apples-to-apples comparisons of carbon dioxide estimates from many sources at different scales: computer models of ecosystem processes, atmospheric models run backward in time to deduce the sources of today's concentrations (called inverse models), satellite images, data from experimental forest plots and more. Continue reading

Photosynthetic biochemical reactions at night |

Cells often face low-oxygen conditions at night, when there's no photosynthesis releasing oxygen into the air and all photosynthetic and non-photosynthetic organisms in the environment are respiring oxygen. When this happens, some organisms such as the single-cell alga Chlamydomonas are able to generate cellular energy from the breakdown of sugars without taking up oxygen. Photosynthesis is probably the most well-known aspect of plant biochemistry. It enables plants, algae, and select bacteria to transform the energy from sunlight during the daytime into chemical energy in the form of sugars and starches (as well as oils and proteins), and it involves taking in carbon dioxide from the air and releasing oxygen derived from water molecules.  Read More:

Without photosynthesis or oxygen, basically all recognizable life that we see in our landscape would be gone |

A world without plants would be a world without oxygen, uninhabitable for us and for many creatures. We know plants release oxygen by absorbing carbon dioxide and breaking down water using sunlight through the process of photosynthesis. However, we know little about the mechanics of how plants create oxygen during photosynthesis. A breakthrough that will help advance our understanding of this critical ecological process was made recently by scientists at LSU.

"Without photosynthesis or oxygen, basically all recognizable life that we see in our landscape would be gone: no animals, no plants," said Terry Bricker, Moreland Family Professor in LSU's Department of Biological Sciences.                                                  Read More |

Scientists perceive plant function and how they optimize their renewal:

"Until now, it was not known how the order of events is guaranteed," Kirchhoff said. "Our results suggest that we have to understand the structural characteristics and dynamics of photosynthetic membranes to understand the repair of the energy-converting nanomachines. This has not been appreciated before."
Helmut Kirchhoff, an assistant professor in WSU's Institute of Biological Chemistry and corresponding author of the PNAS paper, said plants have had to deal with solar damage since the evolution of photosynthesis some 3.5 billion years ago. The process produces energy for the plant but also creates modified oxygen molecules, called reactive oxygen species, or ROS, that can damage proteins and other important plant molecules.
"ROS production can't be avoided, only minimized," said Kirchhoff. "It becomes a big problem for plants under unfavorable environmental conditions, like too much heat, too much light or insufficient nutrition." Read More:

 

Neutron diffraction sheds light on photosynthesis

Plant engineered for more efficient photosynthesis |

"It is an important first step in creating plants with more efficient photosynthesis," Hanson said.
"This is the first time that a plant has been created through genetic engineering to fix all of its carbon by a cyanobacterial enzyme," said Maureen Hanson, a co-author of the study and Liberty Hyde Bailey Professor of Plant Molecular Biology at Cornell.

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The factories of the future... Microalgae

"Photosynthesis is the only biochemical process that removes large quantities of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and transforms them first into sugar and then into many other substances"
The goal is optimum photosynthesis performance with minimum power consumption; in addition to other parameters, the efficiency of algae cultivation depends primarily on the power requirements of the lighting.

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Water and sunlight the formula for sustainable fuel

"It's the beginning of a whole suite of possibilities, such as creating a highly efficient fuel, or to trapping atmospheric carbon." Professor Pace said large amounts of hydrogen fuel produced by artificial photosynthesis could transform the economy. "That carbon-free cycle is essentially indefinitely sustainable. Sunlight is extraordinarily abundant, water is everywhere – the raw materials we need to make the fuel. And at the end of the usage cycle it goes back to water," says he.

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Efficient water splitting |

Water splitting:
It is a key in the process of photosynthesis, through which plants produce glucose and oxygen from water and carbon dioxide, using sunlight as energy. However, there are still significant mysteries about the process.
Renewable energy sources such as solar, wind, hydroelectric and geothermal fluctuate over time, and storing this energy is a crucial task for creating a sustainable society.
For Nakamura, this work has exciting future potential. "As seen from a flower in a vase," he explains, "plants can use even tap water as a resource to make fuels. They do not need acid and base solutions. In other words, nature utilizes a safe, clean, and abundant form of water, thereby creating truly sustainable ecosystems. I hope that our findings will be able to contribute to the use of water at a neutral pH as a resource for generating renewable energy, which is one of the foundations for sustainable human societies."
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Geologists confirm oxygen levels of ancient oceans...

"More than 2.5 billion years ago, there was little to no oxygen in the oceans, as methane shrouded the Earth in a haze," says Lu, a member of Syracuse University's Low-Temperature Geochemistry Research Group. "Organisms practicing photosynthesis eventually started to overpower reducing chemical compounds [i.e., electron donors], and oxygen began building up in the atmosphere. This period has been called the Great Oxidation Event. "Using a novel approach called iodine geochemistry, Lu, Zhou and their colleagues have confirmed the earliest appearance of dissolved oxygen in the ocean's surface waters. 

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Hybrid energy transfer system mimics process responsible for photosynthesis

May 27, 2014
Source:
University of Southampton
Summary:
Scientists have developed a new hybrid energy transfer system, which mimics the processes responsible for photosynthesis. From photosynthesis to respiration, the processes of light absorption and its transfer into energy represent elementary and essential reactions that occur in any biological living system.

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New technique will quicken genetic characterization of photosynthesis |

April 15, 2014
Source:
Carnegie Institution

Potosynthesis provides fixed carbon and energy for nearly all life on Earth, yet many aspects of this fascinating process remain mysterious. For example, little is known about how it is regulated in response to changes in light intensity.
Accelerated renewal