9/15/2023 0 Comments Plants in sunlightWhen sunlight strikes a leaf, each photon (particle of light) delivers energy that excites an LHC. They could still be protected to some extent, and even if a few individuals died, there’d be an increase in the productivity of the remaining population.”Ĭritical to the first steps of photosynthesis are proteins called light-harvesting complexes, or LHCs. “We could control that switch to make plants less hesitant to shut off the protection. “If we could understand how absorbed energy is converted to heat, we might be able to rewire that process to optimize the overall production of biomass and crops,” says Schlau-Cohen. (A picosecond is a trillionth of a second.) The challenge has been to figure out exactly how the photoprotection system in plants works at the molecular level, in the first 250 picoseconds of the photosynthesis process. More importantly, the world could increase crop yields - a change needed to prevent the significant shortfall between agricultural output and demand for food expected by 2050. Indeed, scientists estimate that algae could grow as much as 30 percent more material for use as biofuel. Schlau-Cohen, the Cabot Career Development Assistant Professor of Chemistry. “If plants didn’t waste so much of the sun’s energy unnecessarily, they could be producing more biomass,” says Gabriela S. Under some conditions, they may reject as much as 70 percent of all the solar energy they absorb. To protect themselves, they convert the excess energy into heat and send it back out. But sometimes they absorb more energy than they can use, and that excess can damage critical proteins. Plants rely on the energy in sunlight to produce the nutrients they need.
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