The extremely promising experiment was conducted by scientists from the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, along with colleagues from Sweden, Germany and Great Britain.

Detail

The researchers took “extremely high resolution images” of the different stages of the process (at room temperature), giving them new insights into exactly how and where oxygen is produced. When a plant is exposed to sunlight, it goes through four stable oxidation states known as S0-S3. S0 is the start of the process.

Most of the process that produces respirable oxygen takes place in this last step. But several things happen in different parts of Photosystem II, and they all need to come together for the reaction to be successful.
— says Vittal Yachandra, a scientist at Berkeley Lab and co-author of a paper published in the journal Nature.

How the reaction occurs is influenced by the protein environment around the catalytic center.

Researchers expect an X-ray machine update later this year to shed more light on the process. It will use a repetition rate of one million beats per second, compared to the 120 used in this experiment.

With these updates we will be able to collect several days of data in just a few hours. We will also be able to use soft X-rays to better understand the chemical changes taking place in the system. These new capabilities will continue to drive research forward and shed new light on photosynthesis.
– Adds Uwe Bergmann, a scientist and professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and co-author of the paper.

The team believes that The results will help “develop artificial photosynthetic systems that mimic photosynthesis to harvest natural sunlight to convert carbon dioxide into hydrogen and carbon-based fuels.”. Ian Kern, another co-author of the study and a scientist at Berkeley Lab, said, “The more we learn about how this happens in nature, the closer we come to using the same principles in man-made processes. photosynthesis”.