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Turning Earth grey
For a while now, solar cell researchers have claimed that their constructs are more efficient than plants in collecting solar energy with all sorts of implications I do not want to go into now.
Now, biologists try to "invent" a new form of photosythesis in plants that is more efficient than what nature does. The intention is to make more efficient plants for biofuels vie genetic engineering. These "synthetic plants" would be grey or almost black, because the higher efficiency would mean that they absorb more sunlight and do not as normal plants do, reflect either green or red parts of the light spectrum. Also these plants may, as is hinted in the article, be "created" to lack some of the mechanisms that protect the plant. This makes it likely that these plants have a short life (e.g. will be annuals).
So instead of bioluminescent colorful plants, we will get black plants. What a world...
And they even dare to compare this to Native American practices in making corn a food crop.
Improving photosynthesis? Solar cells beat plants at harvesting sun's energy, for now
The only hope I have if they start using this on a larger scale is that such plants that obvioulsy are "created" to not care for themselves anymore in terms or living and repairing themselves would not be able to survive for long on their own. But who knows - they may be more efficient and become invasive, especially if that is not used only for biofuel plants but also for food crops.Plants are less efficient at capturing the energy in sunlight than solar cells mostly because they have too much evolutionary baggage. Plants have to power a living thing, whereas solar cells only have to send electricity down a wire. This is a big difference because if photosynthesis makes a mistake, it makes toxic byproducts that kill the organism. Photosynthesis has to be conservative to avoid killing the organisms it powers.
"The efficiency of photosynthesis, and our ability to improve it, is critical to whether the entire biofuels industry is viable"
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Just as early Native Americans manipulated skinny, non-nutritious Teosinte into fat, juicy kernel corn, today's plants can be manipulated to become much better sources of energy.
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In synthetic biology plants can be built from scratch, starting with amino acid building blocks, allowing the formation of optimum biological band gaps.
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The newly engineered plants would be darker, incorporating some biological pigments in certain of nature's flora that would be able to absorb photons in the red and infrared regions of the solar spectrum.
This is exactly that sort of contribution I really keep saying genetic engineering plants will give to the disasters of the future.
Grey Plants...
- Industrial civilization turns everything it touches grey!
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Originally Posted by Tsyal Makto
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