Bottom-up chemical construction of photosynthetic cyanobacteria mimics and their controlled assembly into autonomous and self-regulating biofilm-like materials for hydrogen production

Broad interest is devoted nowadays to filling the breach between biology and chemistry in order to comprehend the frontier between living and non-living systems.

In this context, protocells are autonomous and self-sustained entities fabricated from scratch, which may exhibit one or more characteristics of actual cells.

This project aims at synthesizing cyanobacteria mimics capable of producing H2 and formaldehyde from visible light, water, and methanol.

The active material for photosynthesis shall be a semiconducting heterojunction based on BiVO4 and Rh-doped SrTiO3-Pt for Z-scheme photocatalysis.

The photocatalyst shall be contained within functional protein-polymer protocell membranes referred to as proteinosomes.

These photosynthetic protocells will then be chemically programmed to self-assemble into the first autonomous and photosynthetic biofilm-like material (BFM).

The careful three-dimensional design of the BFM, consisting in a combination of mechano-passive, mechano-active and photocatalytic layers of specialized proteinosomes, will allow an emergent and unprecedented photo-mechano-chemical transduction. Therefore, the BFM will be able of an autonomous and self-regulating behavior out of equilibrium.

This proposal pushes forward the borders of bottom-up synthetic biology via a nice interdisciplinary interaction with semiconductor photochemistry.

Furthermore, an alternative and sustainable route to the production of green fuels is provided, which brings an original solution to the current planetary energetic crisis.