Plants Feeding off Quantum Physics

Ever wonder how plants make a living in this world? Sure, they use sunlight (not including, of course, Dionaea muscipula), but how?

I distinctly remember sitting in a botany lecture a few years ago. The professor, moaning and coughing his words, described in intimate and mind numbing detail the process in which light is absorbed and converted into chemical energy (or so I thought...see below)

Small organelles, sub-compartments of individual plant cells, called chloroplasts host a variety of molecules (pigments) capable of absorbing various colors of light, before passing on this energy to a molecule with a lesser energy potential.

Think of these different pigments inhabiting different rungs of a ladder. The energy is passed from higher to lower rungs, until it reaches a protein complex that converts it into chemical energy by “ejecting” an electron to a neighboring complex.

One of botany’s truly fascinating paradigms revolves around how the machinery (i.e. proteins) responsible for these initial steps of photosynthesis works. The root of this paradigm stems from the reaction’s almost instantaneous rate, thus making it both highly stimulating and equally difficult to study.

However, a research team has recently tackled just this problem and came to a very exciting conclusion:

The pigment complexes described above can pick and choose (loosely defined here) the most efficient route for transferring energy transfer between the pigments and associated proteins using the wave-like properties of electrons (think as chemical currency).

What about our ladder rungs?

And the future of solar energy?