Innovation Blog

Tobacco Leaves as Solar Power Plants: Breakthrough from Technion

By Shlomo Maital


Prof. Noam Adir

This is one of the neatest pieces of research I have seen, in recent years, and it comes from my university, Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, here in Haifa.

According to a paper published in the prestigious Proceedings of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, and cited as “must read” by a leading organization of senior biologists,  four Technion researchers have made a breakthrough in researching “greenest of the green” energy – literally, producing energy just as green plants do, through photosynthesis.   [Larom Shirley; Salama Faris; Schuster Gadi; Adir Noam. “Engineering of an alternative electron transfer path in photosystem II”].

In photosynthesis, plants absorb solar energy and convert it into efficient chemical energy.    But how?

Prof. Gadi Schuster (Dean of the Biology Faculty), Prof. Noam Adir (Faculty of Chemistry),  and doctoral students Shirley Larom and Faris Salama  found a key protein that extracts electrons from water and moves them through a membrane (in both bacteria and plants) that isolates the electricity flow and keeps it from escaping.  The researchers changed one single amino acid in the large protein molecule, from a “positive” charge to a “negative” one, so that electrons can flow OUT of the membrance instead of being trapped inside it.   They did this without harming the basic functioning of the protein, so that the bio-engineered plant or bacterium grows completely naturally, to create large amounts of the vital protein.   Note the interdisciplinary nature of the research team.  The collaboration between chemistry and biology was crucial and shows how current and future breakthroughs will require such cooperation as standard.   Perhaps it might be wise to merge the Biology and Chemistry faculties everywhere?

The Technion team also found an electron-carrying protein that could absorb the electrons emitted by the reverse photosynthesis process and transfer them to a kind of battery.

Imagine, the team suggests, a few tobacco leaves that could supply electrical energy equivalent to a one square meter photovoltaic cell.

What a redemption for tobacco – enriching people’s lives rather than shortening them!