Science Buddies: "Ask an Expert"

So, just by the title I believe it's pretty obvious on what I'd like to do for my science project. However I'm having a few dilemmas, such as the thesis, resources, supplies, etc. So please give me any ideas, comments, questions, you think may be able to help me out.

I was inspired to do a project on artificial chlorophyll by a Vsauce video (BiDiPi) on Youtube. And one of the topics happened to be this,( Mentioned on http://www.citylab.com/design/2014/07/c ... es/375207/) and I was very pleased to know that this was finally in our grasp.


Now, I'm just gonna stop right here because I don't want to be out-of-my-league. If this is "too much" for an 8th grader, I'd like to know. To be honest I do not have the requirements to grow chlorophyll, or even obtain it in any form I know of. No, this is project is not required by my school as a grade. I am doing this on my own terms, with slight support from my science teacher.

Back to what I was saying, I was so happy to think that one-day we could have cleaner air with artificial chlorophyll through the process of photosynthesis. Knowing that photosynthesis isn't the plant trying to clean the air, but trying to generate energy, I thought "What if we could use artificial chlorophyll to generate power?"

That's all I have now, and yes I know I have some vocabulary mistakes when it comes to labeling certain parts of the plant. But seriously, I haven't messed with this subject for over two years now. Everyone gets rusty.

Love,
Bob the Builder
(P.S. Yes this is a serious forum.)

Hi Bob,

This is a very interesting concept! In looking at the question you posed, you would have to consider how you can convert the chemical energy provided by photosynthesis into another usable form of energy. Additionally, I would think that you may have to put more energy into the system to be able to convert it compared to using something solar panels to generate energy.

It would seem that an outline for your project would be to generate a device that would exactly replicate the photosynthetic process, with an additional step in being able to generate, say electrical energy, from the sugars produced from photosynthesis. Sounds like a challenging task for sure, since you essentially would need to take all of the biology happening in a chloroplast and make it into a synthetic system.

Let us know if you have further questions, and I'll be happy to help or re-direct your question appropriately.

Hey Bob!

So I thought I would elaborate a little bit off of what PharmaMan said, and talk a little bit about biofuels and how that might relate to your project idea.

It turns out that many many scientist now and in the past have been very interested in this idea of using plants as a clean source or energy, because as you pointed out earth has a bit of a problem with how much carbon dioxide is being put into its atmosphere. Plants are a great option for trying to fix the problem because they make energy (sugars) by taking carbon out of the atmosphere. This is different from gas/oil which just releases carbon into the atmosphere.

In fact, plants are so good at this that I would say we don't even need to make artificial chlorophyll, or try to have artificial photosynthesis, because plants and other photosynthetic organisms already do those things really well. If you think about it, photosynthetic life (and evolution) has spent literally billions of years making this awesome system that turns carbon dioxide in our atmosphere into useable energy, so why spend the extra effort trying to come up with a new way to do something when the old way already works so well?

This is the idea behind biofuel. Basically, we can use plants as miniature power plants (hah, no pun intended…) for us. For example, we know that photosynthesis makes sugars, specifically a sugar called glucose, which can basically be thought of as a unit of energy for the plant (or for things that eat plants). However, plants can use glucose like a building block (think legos) to make all sorts of different things. Some of those things are just fancier types of sugar (like the lactose in milk), but some uses of sugar can be for non-energy purposes, such as reinforcement for the plant. That's what cellulose is, it's a whole bunch of sugar that's put together in a way that makes it really tough. It's what makes those strings in celery so hard to chew up, and so they just end up getting stuck in your teeth.

I actually found a project on sciencbuddies (https://www.sciencebuddies.org/science- ... p038.shtml) that lets you take cellulose from plants and make ethanol. Ethanol is an alcohol; it's actually the type of alcohol that you find in beer, wine, and liquor. Importantly, ethanol actually has a lot of energy in it, and you can run a car on it! So that means you can take a plant, treat it with some chemicals and then run your car using the energy from the sugars in that plant. Maybe a project like this would be something you'd be interested in? Making biofuels actually let's you learn about all sorts of interesting chemistry. This is a project that I would definitely say you would need help with, and hopefully your science teacher could be that help, but I think it would be doable for an 8th grader.

To specifically address your project idea, I would agree with PharmaMan and say that artificially making something that can photosynthesize that wasn't a plant (or some other type of photosynthesizing living thing) would be very very hard. Plants are really complicated, and it takes a lot of work to keep photosynthesis going. It would be tricky to perfectly replicate photosynthesis artificially because there's all sorts of crazy chemistry going on in plants that humans don't know how to do without the help of living things.

I hope this response was helpful and not too long or boring. Please let me know if you want any other information or feedback on your project, and I hope you continue to pursue this idea!

PS Vsauce is amazing! I love that channel so much