Photosynthesis

Photosynthesis has been an important field of research for more than a century, but the present concerns about energy, environment and climate have greatly intensified interest in and research on this topic. Research has progressed rapidly in recent years, and this book is an interesting read for an audience who is concerned with various ways of harnessing solar energy. Our understanding of photosynthesis can now be said to have reached encyclopedic dimensions. There have been, in the past, many good books at various levels. Our book is expected to fulfill the needs of advanced undergraduate and beginning graduate students in branches of biology, biochemistry, biophysics, and bioengineering because photosynthesis is the basis of future advances in producing more food, more biomass, more fuel, and new chemicals for our expanding global human population. Further, the basics of photosynthesis are and will be used not only for the above, but in artificial photosynthesis, an important emerging field where chemists, researchers and engineers of solar energy systems will play a major role.

Explains photosynthesis, the process responsible for providing the material and energy for all living things, and discusses such related issues as respiration, the carbon cycle, acid rain, and the greenhouse effect.

Since the events crucial to plant photosynthesis are now known in molecular detail, this process is no longer nature's secret, but can for the first time be mimicked by technology. Broad in its scope, this book spans the basics of biological photosynthesis right up to the current approaches for its technical exploitation, making it the most complete resource on artificial photosynthesis ever published. The contents draw on the expertise of the Australian Artificial Photosynthesis Network, currently the world's largest coordinated research effort to develop effective photosynthesis technology. This is further backed by expert contributions from around the globe, providing an authoritative overview of current research worldwide.

Photosynthesis is an active area of research in which many exciting developments have taken place in the last few years. This book gives an overview of the present understanding of all areas of molecular processes of photosynthesis. It is based on the international literature available in the summer of 1986 and much unpublished material. The new material contained in this book, together with a basic framework of established concepts, provide a useful source of reference on the biochemical and biophysical aspects of photosynthesis in plants and bacteria. The book is written by specialists in the various areas of photosynthesis and is useful both for workers in these areas as a source of specialized information as well as for non-photosynthesists who want to become informed about recent developments and basic concepts in this area.

To address the environmental, socioeconomic, and geopolitical issues associated with increasing global human energy consumption, technologies for utilizing renewable carbon-free or carbon-neutral energy sources must be identified and developed. Among renewable sources, solar energy is quite promising as it alone is sufficient to meet global human demands well into the foreseeable future. However, it is diffuse and diurnal. Thus effective strategies must be developed for its capture, conversion and storage. In this context, photosynthesis provides a paradigm for large-scale deployment. Photosynthesis occurs in plants, algae, and cyanobacteria and has evolved over 3 billion years. The process of photosynthesis currently produces more than 100 billion tons of dry biomass annually, which equates to a global energy storage rate of ~100 TW. Recently, detailed structural information on the natural photosynthetic systems has been acquired at the molecular level, providing a foundation for comprehensive functional studies of the photosynthetic process. Likewise, sophisticated spectroscopic techniques have revealed important mechanistic details. Such accomplishments have made it possible for scientists and engineers to construct artificial systems for solar energy transduction that are inspired by their biological counterparts. The book contains articles written by experts and world leaders in their respective fields and summarizes the exciting breakthroughs toward understanding the structures and mechanisms of the photosynthetic apparatus as well as efforts toward developing revolutionary new energy conversion technologies. The topics/chapters will be organized in terms of the natural sequence of events occurring in the process of photosynthesis, while keeping a higher-order organization of structure and mechanism as well as the notion that biology can inspire human technologies. For example, the topic of light harvesting, will be followed by charge separation at reaction centers, followed by charge stabilization, followed by chemical reactions, followed by protection mechanisms, followed by other more specialized topics and finally ending with artificial systems and looking forward. As shown in the table of contents (TOC), the book includes and integrates topics on the structures and mechanisms of photosynthesis, and provides relevant information on applications to bioenergy and solar energy transduction.

Recounting the compelling story of a scientific discovery that took more than a century to complete, this trail-blazing monograph focuses on methodological issues and is the first to delve into this subject. This book charts how the biochemical and biophysical mechanisms of photosynthesis were teased out by succeeding generations of scientists, and the author highlights the reconstruction of the heuristics of modelling the mechanism—analyzed at both individual and collective levels. Photosynthesis makes for an instructive example. The first tentative ideas were developed by organic chemists around 1840, while by 1960 an elaborate proposal at a molecular level, for both light and dark reactions, was established. The latter is still assumed to be basically correct today. The author makes a persuasive case for a historically informed philosophy of science, especially regarding methodology, and advocates a history of science whose narrative deploys philosophical approaches and categories. She shows how scientists’ attempts to formulate, justify, modify, confirm or criticize their models are best interpreted as series of coordinated research actions, dependent on a network of super- and subordinated epistemic goals, and guided by recurrent heuristic strategies. With dedicated chapters on key figures such as Otto Warburg, who borrowed epistemic fundamentals from other disciplines to facilitate his own work on photosynthesis, and on more general topics relating to the development of the field after Warburg, this new work is both a philosophical reflection on the nature of scientific enquiry and a detailed history of the processes behind one of science’s most important discoveries.

Photosynthesis: Photobiochemistry and Photobiophysics is the first single-authored book in the Advances in Photosynthesis Series. It provides an overview of the light reactions and electron transfers in both oxygenic and anoxygenic photosynthesis. The scope of the book is characterized by the time frame in which the light reactions and the subsequent electron transfers take place, namely between =10sup-12/sup and =10-3 second. The book is divided into five parts: An Overview; Bacterial Photosynthesis; Photosystem II & Oxygen Evolution; Photosystem I; and Proton Transport and Photophosphorylation. In discussing the structure and function of various protein complexes, we begin with an introductory chapter, followed by chapters on light-harvesting complexes, the primary electron donors and the primary electron acceptors, and finally the secondary electron donors. The discussion on electron acceptors is presented in the order of their discovery to convey a sense of history, in parallel with the advancement in instrumentation of increasing time resolution. The book includes a large number of stereo pictures showing the three-dimensional structure of various photosynthetic proteins, which can be easily viewed with unaided eyes. This book is designed to be used as a textbook in a graduate or upper-division undergraduate course in photosynthesis, photobiology, plant physiology, biochemistry, and biophysics; it is equally suitable as a resource book for students, teachers, and researchers in the areas of molecular and cellular biology, integrative biology, microbiology, and plant biology.