Spectroscopic investigation reveals picosecond electron transfer in gold–cyanobacteria hybrids, indicating an efficient biotic–abiotic pathway that boosts solar-driven glycerol synthesis.
The rise of inorganic–biohybrid organisms for solar-to-chemical production has spurred mechanistic investigations into the dynamics of the biotic–abiotic interface to drive the development of next-generation hybrid systems. The model system, cyanobacteria–gold nanoparticle hybrids, combines a light harvester with a photosynthetic bacterium to drive the reduction of CO2 to glycerol with improved efficiency and increased glycerol production by 14.6%, in comparison to cyanobacteria only. In this work, we report insights into this unique photochemical behavior and propose a charge-transfer pathway from Au nanoparticle to cyanobacteria. Transient absorption (TA) spectroscopy revealed that photoexcited electron transfer rates are on the order of a few ps to the potential electron acceptor in photosystem II. This work represents a promising platform to utilize a conventional spectroscopic methodology to extract insights from more complex biotic–abiotic hybrid systems.
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Hu et al. (2022) studied this question.
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