Cambridge, MA--A team of researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has used a modified virus as a kind of biological scaffold that can assemble the nanoscale components needed to split a water molecule into hydrogen and oxygen atoms.1
By using sunlight to make hydrogen from water, the hydrogen could then be stored and used at any time to generate electricity using a fuel cell, or to make liquid fuels (or be used directly) for cars and trucks.
Amassing a catalyst and a pigment
Led by Angela Belcher, the team engineered a common, harmless bacterial virus called M13 so that it would attract and bind with molecules of a catalyst (the team used iridium oxide) and a biological pigment (zinc porphyrins). The viruses became wire-like devices that could efficiently split the oxygen from water molecules.
Because the virus wires would clump together and lose their effectiveness, the researchers added an extra step: encapsulating them in a microgel matrix so that they maintained their uniform arrangement and kept their stability and efficiency.
While hydrogen obtained from water is the gas that would be used as a fuel, the splitting of oxygen from water is the more technically challenging "half-reaction" in the process, Belcher explains, so her team focused on this part. Plants and cyanobacteria (also called blue-green algae), she says, "have evolved highly organized photosynthetic systems for the efficient oxidation of water." Other researchers have tried to use the photosynthetic parts of plants directly for harnessing sunlight, but these materials can have structural stability issues.
Belcher decided that instead of borrowing plants' components, she would borrow their methods. In plant cells, natural pigments are used to absorb sunlight, while catalysts then promote the water-splitting reaction. That's the process Belcher and her team, including doctoral student Yoon Sung Nam, the lead author of the new paper, decided to imitate.
In their system, the viruses simply act as a kind of scaffolding, causing the pigments and catalysts to line up with the right kind of spacing to trigger the water-splitting reaction. The role of the pigments is "to act as an antenna to capture the light," Belcher says, "and then transfer the energy down the length of the virus, like a wire. The virus is a very efficient harvester of light, with these porphyrins attached. We use components people have used before, but we use biology to organize them for us, so you get better efficiency."
Oxygen now, hydrogen next
Using the virus to make the system assemble itself improves the efficiency of the oxygen production fourfold, Nam says. The researchers hope to find a similar biologically based system to perform the other half of the process, the production of hydrogen. Currently, the hydrogen atoms from the water get split into their component protons and electrons; a second part of the system, now being developed, would combine these back into hydrogen atoms and molecules. The team is also working to find a more commonplace, less-expensive material for the catalyst, to replace the relatively rare and costly iridium used in this proof-of-concept study.
Thomas Mallouk, a professor at Pennsylvania State University (University Park, PA), who was not involved in this work, says, "This is an extremely clever piece of work that addresses one of the most difficult problems in artificial photosynthesis, namely, the nanoscale organization of the components in order to control electron-transfer rates. There is a daunting combination of problems to be solved before this or any other artificial photosynthetic system could actually be useful for energy conversion."
To be cost-competitive with other approaches to solar power, he says, the system would need to be at least ten times more efficient than natural photosynthesis, be able to repeat the reaction a billion times, and use less expensive materials. "This is unlikely to happen in the near future," he says. "Nevertheless, the design idea illustrated in this paper could ultimately help with an important piece of the puzzle."
Belcher will not even speculate about how long it might take to develop this into a commercial product, but she says that within two years she expects to have a prototype device that can carry out the whole process of splitting water into oxygen and hydrogen, using a self-sustaining and durable system.
REFERENCE
1. Yoon Sung Nam et al.,Nature Nanotechnology, April 11, 2010.
--posted by John Wallace