Nature's billion-year-old battery key to storing energy
New research at Concordia University is bringing us one step closer to clean energy. It is possible to extend the length of time a battery-like enzyme can store energy from seconds to hours, a study published in the Journal of The American Chemical Society shows.
Concordia Associate Professor László Kálmán — along with his colleagues in the Department of Physics, graduate students Sasmit Deshmukh and Kai Tang — has been working with an enzyme found in bacteria that is crucial for capturing solar energy. Light induces a charge separation in the enzyme, causing one end to become negatively charged and the other positively charged, much like in a battery.
In nature, the energy created is used immediately, but Kálmán says that to store that electrical potential, he and his colleagues had to find a way to keep the enzyme in a charge-separated state for a longer period of time.
"We had to create a situation where the charges don't want to or are not allowed to go back, and that's what we did in this study," says Kálmán.
Kálmán and his colleagues showed that by adding different molecules, they were able to alter the shape of the enzyme and, thus, extend the lifespan of its electrical potential.
In its natural configuration, the enzyme is perfectly embedded in the cell's outer layer, known as the lipid membrane. The enzyme's structure allows it to quickly recombine the charges and recover from a charge-separated state.
http://phys.org/news/2012-04-nature-billion-year-old-battery-key-energy.html
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Thanks for the thread, MindMover. 
