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Bioinspiration in light harvesting and catalysis

Abstract

Capturing and converting solar energy into fuels and feedstocks is a global challenge that spans numerous disciplines and fields of research. Billions of years of evolution have allowed natural organisms to hone strategies for harvesting light from the sun and storing energy in the form of carbon–carbon and carbon–hydrogen bonds. Photosynthetic antenna proteins capture solar photons and funnel photoexcitations to reaction centres with high yields, and enzymes catalyze multi-electron reactions, facilitating chemical transformations not yet efficiently implemented using artificially engineered catalysts. Researchers in renewable energy often look to nature to understand the mechanisms at work and, if possible, to explore their translation into artificial systems. Here, we review advances in bioinspiration across the fields of biological light harvesting and chemical energy conversion. We examine how multi-photon and multi-electron reactions in biology can inspire new methods in photoredox chemistry to achieve novel, selective and complex organic transformations; how carbonic-dehydrogenase-inspired design principles enable catalytic reactions such as the conversion of CO2 into useful products such as fuels; and how concepts from photosynthetic antenna complexes and reaction centres can benefit artificial light-harvesting materials. We then consider areas in which bioinspiration could enable advances in the rational design of molecules and materials, the expansion of the synthetic capabilities of catalysts and the valorization of molecular building blocks. We highlight the challenges that must be overcome to realize these advances and propose new directions that may use bioinspiration to achieve them.

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Fig. 1: Z-schemes in photocatalysis and multi-electron photochemistry.
Fig. 2: Bio-inspired catalysis at different length scales.
Fig. 3: Reactant-transport strategies in catalyst systems.
Fig. 4: Long-range exciton transport and energy funnelling in photosynthesis and planar, organic, photovoltaic-device architectures.
Fig. 5: Bioinspiration in materials science and chemistry.

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Acknowledgements

All authors acknowledge support from CIFAR for facilitating meetings that helped conceive this work and related collaborations. C.J.C. thanks DOE/LBNL grant 101528-002 for funding. G.S.-C., A.G.D. and G.D.S acknowledge support from the Division of Chemical Sciences, Geosciences, and Biosciences, Office of Basic Energy Sciences of the U.S. Department of Energy through grant no. DE-SC0019370. A.H.P. was partly funded through a CGS D grant from NSERC. We thank Fraser Armstrong, Barry Rand, Koen Vandewal and Johannes Benduhn for helpful discussions.

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Proppe, A.H., Li, Y.C., Aspuru-Guzik, A. et al. Bioinspiration in light harvesting and catalysis. Nat Rev Mater 5, 828–846 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41578-020-0222-0

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