Photovoltaic cells are becoming cheaper and more efficient each year, but there are still some questions regarding their long-term sustainability. Most technologies involve the use of elements that may be limited in supply, toxic, expensive, and difficult to recycle, which may ultimately limit our ability to produce them on the sorts of scales that a wholly renewable energy economy would require. One possible alternative to the traditional hardware is the use of biological materials, which are invariably comprised of abundant elements, and are produced in bulk by organisms simply as part of their normal life. The main downside of biologicals has been that they’re far less stable than solid-state devices, which can last for decades. But a study released by Nature Chemistry indicates that it’s possible to use an organism’s own self-repair systems to keep proteins operating long past the end of their normal lifespan.

Compared to some of the best devices on the market today, the systems cells used to harvest sunlight during photosynthesis aren’t very efficient. But they do have two major advantages. Since life evolved to rely on some of the most abundant elements around—primarily carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, and oxygen—producing more of them and recycling damaged components is incredibly simple. It also partially eliminates the manufacturing issues, since bacteria will happily pump out more of the light-harvesting proteins each time they divide. That doesn’t mean there’s a requirement for some hardware to support the proteins, but this is generally simpler and cheaper than the hardware used to harvest light.

Read the comments on this post

Originally posted here:
Bacterial light-harvesting proteins make a regenerating solar cell