Paving our way for our day in the sun

It might be hard to believe it, but the solution to one of the greatest challenges to global environmental sustainability facing mankind today – the production of clean fuel – has already been found. The existing expert has honed a successful green energy production process over billions of years, and now, a team of University of Glasgow experts recruited from across the disciplines of biology, chemistry and engineering are hoping to not only copy, but improve upon the process - a goal which has thus far eluded scientists from across the globe.

But who is the owner of this most-coveted of secrets?

It’s not a multinational energy provider, a leading research group, or a maverick scientist. In fact, the expert that the Glasgow team is hoping to borrow from is the humble leaf, and the process in question is photosynthesis.

 “What we are trying to do,” explains Professor Cogdell, “is to learn from biology to produce an array of mimics that we can test, always referring back to how biology has evolved in clever ways.” The method Professor Cogdell is referring to is known as synthetic biology.

Jargon buster - what is synthetic biology? Synthetic biology is an emerging technique that either aims to design and construct new biological devices and systems, or re-design existing, natural biological systems for useful purposes.

It’s a well-tried process to harvest energy from the sun and produce electricity using solar cells and panels, but two problems prevent this method from providing a true solution to the challenge of green energy. Firstly, it is very difficult to store electricity, and secondly, electricity accounts for only 30 per cent of mankind’s overall energy requirements, with demand for fuels such as hydrogen, methanol and ethanol at 70 per cent. The obvious answer is, therefore, to concentrate efforts on converting solar energy not into electricity, but into fuel.

Plants take takes solar energy, concentrate it, and then use that energy to fix CO2 from the atmosphere into fuel, releasing oxygen at the same time. “If we could devise a robust chemical analogue that could do that,” says Professor Cogdell, “to create what you might call an artificial leaf, then we would be well on the way to having solar collectors that produce a fuel.”

It’s an ambitious aim, and one that requires collaboration across traditional academic boundaries. The University of Glasgow team contains expertise in the areas of biology, chemistry and engineering. It is, as Professor Cogdell explains, going to be a lengthy journey, and the team recognise the need, both for further collaboration internationally, and to raise global awareness of the potential of artificial photosynthesis. To this end, the University of Glasgow is to host a four-day symposium on solar and bioenergy in September, with expert speakers from Lausanne (Switzerland), Uppsala (Sweden), Imperial College London, Berkeley and Illinois.

“I’m hoping that lots of people around the world are going to be trying different parts of the same thing because it’s going to require a large amount of co-operative work to achieve this,” says Professor Cogdell. “We won’t certainly succeed with all our aims in four years, but it’s very important to make a start.”