Publication date: 21st July 2025
Photosynthesis is one of the most important processes for life on our planet, yet many important questions regarding its fundamental mechanisms remain unanswered. The rapidly developing field of bioelectronic devices that use photosynthetic organisms such as cyanobacteria wired to electrodes has given an urgency to furthering our understanding of these systems. In this talk, I will outline two areas in which scattering-based techniques have shone new light on pressing questions in this field.
Firstly, development of bioelectronic technologies such as biophotovoltaics requires a detailed understanding of the electron transfer mechanisms at the biofilm/electrode interface, which currently represents the bottleneck in improving efficiency1. A more efficient method has been to extract the photosynthetic thylakoid membranes and deposit these directly onto the electrode2,3. However, these systems are still highly complex and deconvoluting their components and the parameters that contribute to their electron-transfer mechanisms from a top-down perspective is non-trivial. To address this, we have used neutron reflectometry coupled with spectroelectrochemistry in situ to compare electrodes with extracted thylakoid membranes to those using a model lipid/protein mixture. This early work has demonstrated the potential of our neutron reflectometry/spectroelectrochemistry system as well as establishing a platform for further fundamental studies both of photosynthesis in model membranes and also for screening potential improvements to bioelectronic technologies.
Secondly, I will demonstrate how a combination of synchrotron X-ray methods and surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy has allowed us to map iron oxidation states in biofilms with unprecedented accuracy. This has allowed us to resolve a long-fought controversy concerning the evolutionary reason for electron export in cyanobacteria.
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