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Cyber-spinach turns sunlight into sugar

Combination of biological membrane and artificial chemistry could power future synthetic organisms.
  1. Colin Barras
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Spinach leaf, detail.

Membranes from spinach chloroplasts — the light-harvesting organelles in plant cells — were put to work in a microfluidic chip. Credit: Getty

There’s a new way to eat carbon dioxide. Researchers have built an artificial version of a chloroplast, the photosynthetic structures inside plant cells. It uses sunlight and a laboratory-designed chemical pathway to turn CO2 into sugar.

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doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-020-01396-4

References

  1. Miller, T. E. et al. Science 368, 649–654 (2020).

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  2. Schwander, T. et al. Science 354, 900–904 (2016).

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