The idea sounds as science fictional as cities on Mars. But experiments published in a recent study suggest that it might become possible to nourish plants without photosynthesis
Science fiction stories have imagined future people living in underground cities on Mars, in hollowed-out asteroids, and in free-floating space stations far from the sun. But if humans are ever to survive in any of those harsh and alien environments, they will need ways to grow food using limited resources—and photosynthesis, the wildly successful yet energy-inefficient process by which plants turn sunlight into sugar, might not cut it.
While other experts are skeptical that it will ever be possible to redesign plant biology so radically, they arethe researchers have invented and the team’s out-of-the-box idea about how to make food production more efficient. It’s also a problem on Earth today as the human population grows, placing pressure on farmers to squeeze more calories out of the same land.to photosynthesize more efficiently. The researchers behind the new study are proposing something more unusual: Replacing biological photosynthesis with a partly artificial process for turning sunlight into food.
Compared with photosynthesis, the process was surprisingly efficient. Using artificial photosynthesis, green algae could convert solar energy into biomass about four times as efficiently as crops do using biological photosynthesis. Yeast grown using this process were almost 18 times more energy efficient than crops.
Having grown algae without photosynthesis, the researchers turned to a more difficult question: Could they also grow crop plants?
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