[HN Gopher] Artificial Photosynthesis in the Absence of Light
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Artificial Photosynthesis in the Absence of Light
Author : lr4444lr
Score : 24 points
Date : 2022-06-24 19:13 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nature.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nature.com)
| googlryas wrote:
| I know some of these words...is the idea that acetate is the end
| result of photosynthesis, and they're just skipping that step? Or
| is there a different metabolic pathway that plants have which
| accepts acetate if it is in the environment but falls back to
| photosynthesis if it is not?
| Melatonic wrote:
| So is this about integrating with solar panel farms (which we are
| already doing and is pretty damn cool - basically plants under
| the panels is the simple way) or a completely novel method on its
| own?
| pacbard wrote:
| My read of the abstract is that it is about growing food
| without sunlight or aid the growth of food with sunlight plus
| their thing. This is the focal sentence in the abstract:
|
| > Here a two-step CO2 electrolyser system was developed to
| produce a highly concentrated acetate stream with a 57% carbon
| selectivity (CO2 to acetate), allowing its direct use for the
| heterotrophic cultivation of yeast, mushroom-producing fungus
| and a photosynthetic green alga, in the dark without inputs
| from biological photosynthesis.
|
| My understanding is that they take CO2 from the atmosphere, run
| it through an electrolyzer to create acetate, then add the
| acetate to the plants' environment to skip the need of sunlight
| in and/or aid photosynthesis.
|
| Note that I am not a biologist so this could be completely
| wrong.
| samus wrote:
| A huge benefit would be to reduce the amount of space we need
| for farms. These could be turned back into forests or
| converted to grow crops that are not compatible with the
| acetate boosting yet. Also, this would enable highly
| urbanized countries to achieve a greater degree of self-
| sufficiency, which decreases the need for costly
| transportation.
| seoaeu wrote:
| I've seen lots of people trying to solve the "farms take up
| too much space" issue, but far less evidence that it is
| actually an issue in the first place
| samus wrote:
| This should greatly improve the efficiency of growing marihuana
| indoors. The terrible efficiency of photosynthesis of 1% (as
| stated in the paper) means that currently 99% of the electricity*
| used to light up the plants is wasted!
|
| Apart from drugs, other grass-roots indoor farming efforts will
| also profit from this because this approach allows separating the
| carbon-fixing from the actual farming.
|
| Edit: to expand on the previous paragraph, there could be a
| business opportunity for large-scale carbon-fixing businesses
| that sell the acetate to farms. At least after the kinks in the
| growing procedures have been figured out.
|
| *: the lamps themselves also don't have 100% efficiency
| Teever wrote:
| Your comment about the efficiency isn't correct because you
| haven't taken into account the fact that grow lights do not
| emit the same spectrum as the sun.
|
| This is even more relevant with LED grow lights as the diodes
| are emitting specific wavelengths of light.
| bilsbie wrote:
| This would be great for space travel and off planet colonies.
| markisus wrote:
| This diagram explains the gist of the paper [1]. This system
| supposedly enables growing "algae, yeast, mushroom-producing
| fungus, lettuce, rice, cowpea, green pea, canola, tomato, pepper,
| tobacco" in the dark with acetate.
|
| [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s43016-022-00530-x/figures/1
| goda90 wrote:
| Algae and fungus can be done in the dark, but there seem to be
| some limitations to full plants still: "Plant tolerance and
| consumption of acetate as a heterotrophic energy source will
| need to be increased to fully decouple plants from biological
| photosynthesis."
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(page generated 2022-06-24 23:00 UTC)