More efficient photosynthesis?

[k9bfriender]

@Stranger_On_A_Train

The ultimate renewable energy source would be a glucose-based economy where solar is converted to the carbohydrate that can be used in biologically-based or biomemetic industrial infrastructure but that is certainly a future development.

This came up in the thread about a “breakthrough” in nuclear fusion, and it reminded me of a “recent breakthrough” in photosynthesis that I had been meaning to ask about.

In this video Anton talks about a paper that claims to be able to get 80% solar efficiency at turning carbon dioxide to acetic acid by adding cadmium and an amino acid containing sulfur to a non-photosynthetic bacteria.

He then goes on to talk about how you can use acetic acid to grow plants without or with little light. It can also be used as a feedstock for a number of chemical precursors.

Groundbreaking Research in Artificial Photosynthesis - Doing What Nature Couldn't

This is the paper that is discussed. In it, the researcher claims to have achieved 80% efficiency.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s43016-022-00530-x
Also an article about it

Cyborg bacteria outperform plants when turning sunlight into useful compounds...

“Once covered with these tiny solar panels, the bacteria can synthesize food, fuels and plastics, all using solar energy,” Sakimoto says. “These bacteria outperform natural photosynthesis.”

The bacteria operate at an efficiency of more than 80 percent, and the process is self-replicating and self-regenerating, making this a zero-waste technology.

Now, two things that I note about this paper. The first is that it is 5 years old, and I wasn’t able to find any followup or advance on this topic, so that doesn’t fill me with a bunch of confidence, but sometimes science doesn’t progress as quickly as one would like.

The second is the line from the article:

Yang says. “We are now looking for more benign light absorbers than cadmium sulfide to provide bacteria with energy from light.”

Which, since cadmium is rather toxic, makes me wonder if the acetic acid produced is contaminated with it, rendering it not as useful for plant growth or going into many consumer products.

Obviously, if this worked as well as advertised, it would be a massive game changer in agriculture, industry, and even atmospheric carbon dioxide removal, so I assume a fair amount of buyer beware is expected here.

Anyone know what’s going on in this field? Is this just another promising dead end, or does it actually have legs?

[naita]

The press release you link to is from 2017, but none of the people mentioned are authors on the paper you linked to, which has a 2022 publishing date …

[k9bfriender]

I did mess that up, apparently. I thought that the second link was the actual paper the article referred to, but it’s instead the paper about the second part of the video, where they are using acetic acid made from electricity, which is interesting in its own right, but not the part I meant to refer to.

I had googled the name of the author of the paper as well as “Cyborg bacteria” and that is where I did not find anything that wasn’t dated 2017. And, though I can find a number of articles about it in various media outlets, I haven’t found a link to the paper itself.

[naita]

I don’t know if it’s this paper, but it’s from those authors on that general topic and has cyborg in the title.
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/acs.accounts.6b00483?casa_token=wIxEaU07h-oAAAAA%3AD0ncdfhOV78AXHEuhg-mNZKRb60qsn4xmSdN38B952lk4ylchD5i0Iu2vnNyIeCOmMwOUkVTPmigNqF2

[k9bfriender]

Probably it, but it’s behind a $40 for 48 hours access paywall.

I suppose the press articles are the best I can find about it.