Cyber-spinach turns sunlight into sugar

Nature News

Image: Stewart

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.

Artificial photosynthesis could be used to drive tiny, non-living, solar-powered factories that churn out therapeutic drugs. And because the new chemical pathway is more efficient than anything nature has evolved, the team hopes that a similar process could some day even help to remove CO₂from the atmosphere — although it is not clear whether it could be turned into a large-scale, economically feasible operation. The work was published in Science on 7 May. Read more on the Nature News website…