Researchers from the University of Cambridge have built what they describe as grids of high-rise ‘nano-housing’ where cyanobacteria can flourish. Project leader Dr Jenny Zhang from the Yusuf Hamied Department of Chemistry said, “There’s been a bottleneck in terms of how much energy you can actually extract from photosynthetic systems, but no one understood where the bottleneck was. Most scientists assumed that the bottleneck was on the biological side, in the bacteria, but we’ve found that a substantial bottleneck is actually on the material side.”
The team 3D-printed custom electrodes out of metal oxide nanoparticles that are designed to work with the bacteria as they perform photosynthesis.