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Bioinspiration in light harvesting and catalysis

Journal Article · · Nature Reviews. Materials
 [1];  [2];  [3];  [4];  [5];  [6];  [7];  [8];  [9];  [10];  [11];  [12];  [13];  [14];  [15];  [16];  [17];  [18];  [19];  [16] more »;  [20];  [21];  [2] « less
  1. Canadian Inst. for Advances Research (CIFAR), Toronto, ON (Canada); Univ. of Toronto, ON (Canada); Princeton University
  2. Canadian Inst. for Advances Research (CIFAR), Toronto, ON (Canada); Univ. of Toronto, ON (Canada)
  3. Canadian Inst. for Advances Research (CIFAR), Toronto, ON (Canada); Univ. of Toronto, ON (Canada); Vector Inst., Toronto, ON (Canada)
  4. Canadian Inst. for Advances Research (CIFAR), Toronto, ON (Canada); Univ. of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC (Canada)
  5. Canadian Inst. for Advances Research (CIFAR), Toronto, ON (Canada); Univ. of California, Berkeley, CA (United States)
  6. Canadian Inst. for Advances Research (CIFAR), Toronto, ON (Canada); Univ. of Glasgow (United Kingdom)
  7. Princeton Univ., NJ (United States)
  8. Harvard Univ., Cambridge, MA (United States)
  9. Canadian Inst. for Advances Research (CIFAR), Toronto, ON (Canada); Univ. of California, Riverside, CA (United States)
  10. Canadian Inst. for Advances Research (CIFAR), Toronto, ON (Canada); Vrije Univ. Amsterdam (The Netherlands)
  11. Canadian Inst. for Advances Research (CIFAR), Toronto, ON (Canada); Yale Univ., New Haven, CT (United States)
  12. Canadian Inst. for Advances Research (CIFAR), Toronto, ON (Canada); TOTAL American Services, Hopkinton, MA (United States)
  13. Univ. of Toronto, ON (Canada)
  14. Canadian Inst. for Advances Research (CIFAR), Toronto, ON (Canada); Univ. Laval, Quebec City, QC (Canada)
  15. Canadian Inst. for Advances Research (CIFAR), Toronto, ON (Canada); Technische Univ. Dresden (Germany)
  16. Canadian Inst. for Advances Research (CIFAR), Toronto, ON (Canada); Univ. of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA (United States)
  17. Canadian Inst. for Advances Research (CIFAR), Toronto, ON (Canada); Harvard Univ., Cambridge, MA (United States)
  18. Canadian Inst. for Advances Research (CIFAR), Toronto, ON (Canada); Massachusetts Inst. of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, MA (United States)
  19. Canadian Inst. for Advances Research (CIFAR), Toronto, ON (Canada); Princeton Univ., NJ (United States)
  20. Canadian Inst. for Advances Research (CIFAR), Toronto, ON (Canada); Univ. of Hong Kong (China)
  21. Canadian Inst. for Advances Research (CIFAR), Toronto, ON (Canada); Univ. of California, Irvine, CA (United States)
+ Show Author Affiliations
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. Here, we highlight the challenges that must be overcome to realize these advances and propose new directions that may use bioinspiration to achieve them.
Research Organization:
Princeton Univ., NJ (United States)
Sponsoring Organization:
USDOE Office of Science (SC), Basic Energy Sciences (BES). Chemical Sciences, Geosciences & Biosciences Division
Grant/Contract Number:
SC0019370
OSTI ID:
1756854
Journal Information:
Nature Reviews. Materials, Journal Name: Nature Reviews. Materials Journal Issue: 11 Vol. 5; ISSN 2058-8437
Publisher:
Nature Publishing GroupCopyright Statement
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English

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36 MATERIALS SCIENCE
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