Latest Photosynthesis Stories

In a head-to-head battle of harvesting the sun's energy, solar cells beat plants, according to a new paper in Science. But scientists think they can even up the playing field, says researcher David Kramer at Michigan State University.Plants are less efficient at capturing the energy in sunlight than solar cells mostly because they have too much evolutionary baggage. Plants have to power a living thing, whereas solar cells only have to send electricity down a wire. This is a big difference...

"I have a slide that has a photo of a cornfield and a big photovoltaic array," says Robert Blankenship, a scientist who studies photosynthesis at Washington University in St. Louis. "When I give talks I often ask the audience which one is more efficient. Invariably the audience votes overwhelmingly in favor of photosynthesis. "They are wrong.This question and its surprising answer (below) is the point of departure for a provocative article published in the May 13 issue of...

The urea cycle is a metabolic pathway used in mammals to incorporate excess nitrogen into urea and remove it from the body. However, it appears to play a far more wide-ranging role in the group of algae known as diatoms. Scientists from the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Plant Physiology in Potsdam are part of an international team of researchers that has succeeded in identifying the urea cycle in diatoms as a distribution and recycling centre for inorganic carbon and nitrogen. The urea...

SAN DIEGO, May 11, 2011 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Researchers from the J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI) along with an international team of scientists have published a paper detailing new findings about marine diatoms showing that they utilize a urea cycle and that this cycle enables these organisms to efficiently utilize carbon and nitrogen from their environment. The paper is being published in the May 12th, 2011 issue of the journal Nature. The research team, led by Andrew Allen from...

Single-cell marine organisms offer clues to how cells interact with the environmentFrom a bucket of seawater, scientists have unlocked information that may lead to deeper understanding of organisms as different as coral reefs and human disease. By analyzing genomes of a tiny, single-celled marine animal, they have demonstrated a possible way to address diverse questions such as how diseased cells differ from neighboring healthy cells and what it is about some Antarctic algae that allows them...

Between 5 and 10 million years ago, the landscape on Earth changed dramatically. Brown University biologists and colleagues have determined that cacti exploded onto the global scene then, about the same geologic time as other succulent plants and tropical grasses. The trigger: A global period marked by cooling and increased aridity, possibly with lowered atmospheric carbon-dioxide levels. Their findings appear in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.The cactus, stalwart of the...

The Earth may be able to recover from rising carbon dioxide emissions faster than previously thought, according to evidence from a prehistoric event analyzed by a Purdue University-led team.When faced with high levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide and rising temperatures 56 million years ago, the Earth increased its ability to pull carbon from the air. This led to a recovery that was quicker than anticipated by many models of the carbon cycle - though still on the order of tens of thousands...

Remote lochs along the west coast of Scotland are turning up new evidence about the origins of life on land. A team of scientists from the University of Sheffield, the University of Oxford and Boston College, who are exploring rocks around Loch Torridon, have discovered the remarkably preserved remains of organisms that once lived on the bottom of ancient lake beds as long as a billion (1,000 million) years ago.These fossils illuminate a key moment in the history of evolution when life made...

Patrick Lynch, NASA's Earth Science News TeamMary Cleave left the NASA astronaut corps in the early 1990s to make a rare jump from human spaceflight to Earth science. She was going to work on an upcoming mission to measure gradations in ocean color "“ something she had actually seen from low-Earth orbit with her own eyes. From space, differing densities of phytoplankton and algae and floating bits of plant life reveal themselves as so many blues and greens. For Cleave, a former...

Researchers used an "Ideas Lab" to generate potentially transformative projects and stimulate new approaches to a long-standing scientific problemScientists in the United States and the United Kingdom have been awarded funding totaling more than $10.3 million to improve the process of biological photosynthesis. The U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) and the U.K. Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) collaborated in issuing these jointly funded...