Blood Protein Used to Split Water

brian0918 writes "The Imperial College in London is reporting that genetically-engineered blood protein can be used to split water into oxygen and hydrogen. The abstract can be viewed for free from the Journal of the American Chemical Society." From the article: "Scientists have combined two molecules that occur naturally in blood to engineer a molecular complex that uses solar energy to split water into hydrogen and oxygen. This molecular complex can use energy from the sun to create hydrogen gas, providing an alternative to electrolysis, the method typically used to split water into its constituent parts. The breakthrough may pave the way for the development of novel ways of creating hydrogen gas for use as fuel in the future."

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Catalase (cool experiment)

[b0s0z0ku]

Blood also contains a protein called catalase. It makes the hydrogen peroxide that you put on a wounds bubble up with little oxygen bubbles. Yeast contains the same protein. Mix yeast and 3% peroxide solution and you get ------ oxygen and water. Stick a burning match in it and it burns with a bright white flame like a welding torch.

-b.

Re:We really don't want to do that.

[catbutt]

Given that its from a living thing anyway, it seems like if breaking down hydrogen and oxygen in mass had any survival benefit, natural selection would have figured it out already.

Obviously, caution is always needed in genetic tinkering, but still....I think the knee jerk "OMG its going to zap all our oceans!" is unwarranted.

Re:How effecient is this?

[kebes]

I'm reading over the actual article right now. It seems that process is quite efficient. In the conclusion of the paper they note:

Currently, rHSA(wt) is manufactured in an industrial scale, which allows us to use this zinc-protein photosensitizer in practical applications Thus the raw materials are cheap enough that one could imagine scaling this up significantly. Moreover since its behavior is catalytic, the protein isn't used up, so you wouldn't need to replace it very often.

With regard to efficiency, in the Abstract they also point out that their system is more efficient than the previous standard in organic photo-synthesis:

The efficiency of the photoproduction of H2 was greater than that of the system using the well- known organic chromophore, tetrakis(1-methylpyridinium-4-yl)porphinatozinc(II ) (ZnTMPyP4+), under the same conditions. Since the discovered system is a photosensitized catalyst, it effectively is a new kind of solar power. However it is one that directly generates H2 from incident light, without requiring one to harvest light energy as electricity, store it, and then use it to split water. So this discovery, coupled with cars/devices that run on H2 efficiently, seems like a viable idea. Of course we'll have to wait and see whether this really pans out, but from this paper it does indeed seem that this is a feasible way to harvest solar power (and store it as H2).

Biochemical isn't the only approach

[quoll]

I'm pleased to see alternative technologies to split water using sunlight, but the idea is not new.

There is a group at UNSW who have been working on ceramics which use sunlight to split water (via a process of electrolysis). It's still in research (mostly due to efficiency), but it's an interesting option if you're interested in this stuff.

Their website is pretty sparse, but there is a story on them here.