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A NASA study that won an award may influence how artificial photosynthesis develops in the future 

Artificial photosynthesis is being developed by scientists to assist food production on Earth use less energy and perhaps very soon on the surface of Mars.

In order to produce autonomous food from sunlight using artificial photosynthesis, the researchers from the two universities discovered a mechanism to fully avoid the requirement for biological photosynthesis.

The research, which was released on June 23 in the journal "Nature Food," employs a two-step electrical stimulation method to turn water, electricity, and carbon dioxide into acetate or acetate, a salt or ester of acetic acid, the primary ingredient in vinegar. Food-producing organisms grow by consuming the resultant acetate in the dark.

Over the course of millions of years, photosynthesis in plants has developed to create plant biomass, which serves as the foundation for the majority of the meals we eat, from water, carbon dioxide, and sunlight energy.

However, according to experts from the University of Delaware and the University of California at Riverside, this mechanism is incredibly inefficient because the plant only uses around 1% of the energy present in sunlight.

This hybrid system (organic - inorganic) can boost the efficiency of converting sunlight into food, up to 18 times more efficient than some plants, when used in conjunction utilizing solar energy to produce electricity for electrical stimulation.

A new method of food production

Researcher Robert Jenkerson, an assistant professor of chemical and environmental engineering at the University of California-Riverside, is quoted as saying in the UC Riverside Press Release, which was posted by the Science Alert website in response to the study, that:

"through our approach, we sought to identify a new way of producing food that could go beyond the limits normally imposed by biological photosynthesis."

The output of the electrolyzer has been tuned to encourage the growth of food-producing organisms in order to integrate all the parts of the system together.

Electrolysers are machines that employ electricity to transform unusable chemicals and products—like carbon dioxide—from raw materials.

The highest levels of acetate ever produced in an electrolyzer to date were achieved by increasing the amount of acetate produced while lowering the amount of salt utilized.

According to researcher Feng Jiao from the University of Delaware:

"We were able to obtain excellent selectivity towards acetates that are inaccessible to normal carbon dioxide electrolysis processes utilizing the latest two-step carbon dioxide electrolysis preparation created in our laboratory."

Experiments have demonstrated that a wide range of food-producing organisms, including green algae, yeast, and fungus that create "mushroom" mushrooms, may grow in the dark directly on the electrolyzer output.

The scientists discovered that growing algae using this method uses 4 times less energy than growing them through regular photosynthesis.

The scientists discovered that producing yeast uses around 18 times less energy than conventional methods, which involve utilizing maize sugar as fertilizer.

A more effective method

Compared to food production based on biological photosynthesis, Elizabeth Hahn, a PhD student in the Jenkerson lab and a co-lead author of the paper, said that this technology is a more effective approach to transform solar energy into food.

"We were able to create organisms that produce food without the use of biological photosynthesis."

 These organisms are typically fed petroleum-derived inputs or sugars from plants, which are the end products of the biological photosynthesis process that occurred millions of years ago ".

Currently, researchers are looking into the possibilities of growing crops with this technique. Additionally, when using the technique on some plants, it was discovered that when cultivated in darkness, cowpeas, tomatoes, tobacco, rice, canola, and peas could utilise carbon from acetate.

Countless opportunities

Artificial photosynthesis makes it possible to grow food under the more challenging conditions imposed by climate change by releasing agriculture from total reliance on the sun.

If crops were cultivated in less resource-intensive, regulated conditions, droughts, floods, and land scarcity would pose less of a danger to global food security.

Scientists are working to harness and adapt crops that can be grown in urban areas and other areas that are currently unsuitable for agriculture to produce food and fuel. This new method of food production could change the way we feed people by improving the efficiency of food production.

The procedure demonstrated here is so good that it won NASA's deep space food challenge, which was intended to highlight cutting-edge technology that might one day make it possible to grow food in space.

Artificial photosynthesis has the potential to drastically alter food production and lessen the effects of the climate crisis. While these mechanisms should not be used as an excuse to ignore climate change, they can help make food production more robust.