A living bionic leaf to produce solar fuels and chemicals from carbon dioxide

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Sunlight is an abundant source of clean and economical energy. One-hour of sunlight can satisfy a year's energy demand across the entire world. Inspired from natural photosynthesis, the proposed project develops a bionic leaf that provides a hybrid approach to the conversion of solar energy into fuels and chemicals by integrating microbes with synthetic light harvesters. In such hybrid systems, microbes perform thermodynamically and kinetically challenging chemical reactions with high rates and selectivity, whereas light harvesters act as substrates for microbes or functional components to carry out light absorption, charge transfer and product separation. The project also investigates the microbial life on the photoexcited light harvesters by employing gene expression analysis, live/dead assay and BioRad protein assay. Finally, the project elucidates the fundamental electron transfer mechanism from light harvesters to microbes using advanced spectroscopic techniques.