Photosynthesis: Structures, Mechanisms, and Applications

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.

Harvey J.M. Hou, born in 1962 in China, is a Professor in the Department of Physical Sciences at Alabama State University, Montgomery, Alabama, USA. He received his B.Sc. in Physical Chemistry in 1984 from Wuhan University, and completed his Ph.D. in Analytical Chemistry in 1993 at Peking University (Beijing, China) with Xiaoxia Gao. He had his postdoctoral training at Chinese Academy of Sciences with Peisung Tang and Tingyun Kuang, at Iowa State University with Parag Chitnis, and at the Rockefeller University with David Mauzerall. Since 1995, he has served as a faculty member at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Gonzaga University, the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth, and the Alabama State University. He began his research career in photosynthesis in 1993, working on photosystem II (PS II). In 1996, he visited the laboratory of Jacque Breton in France and studied the orientation of pigments in PS II. In the laboratory of Parag Chitnis, he examined the organization of PS I. Working with David Mauzerall, he systematically investigated the thermodynamics of electron transfer reactions in photosynthesis using pulsed photoacoustics. His work has uncovered a significant entropy change of reaction in PS I; further, he has demonstrated that the entropy change in PS I is dramatically different from that in PS II. Since he established his laboratory in 2002, he has maintained his long-term collaboration with David Mauzerall on the thermodynamics in cyanobacterial PS I and in Heliobacteria. In 2006, he began collaboration with Gary Brudvig at Yale University and Dunwei Wang at Boston College on artificial photosynthesis, and has developed a manganese/semiconductor system for solar energy storage. His research group has also investigated the responses of cyanobacteria and cranberry plants to environment. He co-chaired a symposium at the 15^th International Congress of Photosynthesis Research, chaired the 28th Annual Eastern Regional Photosynthesis Conference, and he co-organized the 38th Annual Midwest/Southeast Photosynthesis Meeting.