Photosynthesis unveiled after 30 million hours of calculation – iOnline

Photosynthesis unveiled after 30 million hours of calculation

                     
                 

It took five years and more than 30 million hours of calculation on supercomputers to scientists can disassemble the photosynthesis process Rodrigo Cabrita Kathy Catullus 09/30/2015 15:55:00

                     
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One of the biggest mysteries of nature was unveiled with the help of Portuguese scientists.

 
                 

Any student of elementary education learns in school that photosynthesis is a physical-chemical process at the cellular level, carried out by plants that use carbon dioxide and water for glucose through solar energy, according to the following equation:

 Sunlight + 12H2O + 6CO2 – & gt; 6O2 + 6H2O C6H12O6 +

The problem is to explain the process. It took five years and more than 30 million hours of calculation in European supercomputers to an international team of scientists now able to unravel the mystery. It was the first time they studied all the huge structure (about 18,000 atoms) of what is called “the starter photosynthesis machine”, using only the quantum mechanics.

 
 

And among the authors of this discovery were the Portuguese Department of Physics, University of Coimbra, who managed to simulate the light-gathering process of the gigantic structure of molecules – the antenna called Light-Harvesting Complex II – involved in the first step of photosynthesis in plants.

The results of the study, already published online and will be the headline of the magazine’s October issue “Physical Chemistry Chemical Physics”, are essential to the achievement realize how nature has solved the problem of capturing the energy of sun. “And he did it in a remarkably efficient manner. Much better than current photovoltaic panels, “says the coordinator of the Portuguese team, Fernando Nogueira.

In this study, the researchers identified through an unprecedented calculation, who does what in this giant and intricate sort of Network chlorophylls. In this process, only a molecule is that plays the major role in photosystem structure. All other function as antennas to capture energy, transferring it immediately to the central molecule, “which is where we give the following steps of the process,” says the expert in Computational Physics, University of Coimbra.

It remains to unravel how it handles the transfer of energy to the center of the reaction:. “To understand how these antennas transmit power to the central molecule of photosystem is the next step in the investigation collects an enormous amount of information that is necessary to disentangle. “

 
 
 
 
 
                 

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