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Bioinspired materials

Boosting plant biology

Nature Materials volume 13, pages 329–331 (2014)Cite this article

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Chloroplasts with extended photosynthetic activity beyond the visible absorption spectrum, and living leaves that perform non-biological functions, are made possible by localizing nanoparticles within plant organelles.

The photosynthetic machinery is utterly ingenious. It uses the antenna effect, wherein many high-cross-section light absorbers — molecules, such as chlorophyll, that are embedded in the protein complexes that make up the photosynthetic unit of plants — funnel their energy (transiently captured as photoexcitations) into a much smaller number of reaction centres, the protein complexes that initiate a chain of reactions to convert the photoexcitations into chemical energy. Across the Earth, absorbed sunlight powers biochemical processes that produce a staggering 100 billion tons of biomass annually.

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Figure 1: Natural and nanobionic chloroplasts.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Gregory D. Scholes is at the Department of Chemistry, University of Toronto, 80 St George Street, Toronto, Ontario M5S 3H6, Canada,

    Gregory D. Scholes

  2. Edward H. Sargent is at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Toronto, 10 King's College Road, Toronto, Ontario M5S 3G4, Canada,

    Edward H. Sargent

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  1. Gregory D. Scholes
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  2. Edward H. Sargent
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Correspondence to Gregory D. Scholes or Edward H. Sargent.

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Scholes, G., Sargent, E. Boosting plant biology. Nature Mater 13, 329–331 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1038/nmat3926

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