Photosystem II-based biomimetic assembly for enhanced photosynthesis

Mingjun Xuan, Junbai Li
2021 National Science Review  
PSII is a fascinating photosynthesis-involved enzyme, which takes sunlight harvest, water splitting, oxygen release, and protons/electrons generation and transfer. These advantages inspire scientists to couple PSII with synthetic hierarchical structures via biomimetic assembly, allowing natural photosynthesis processes achieve in vivo, such as photocatalytic water-splitting, electron transfer, and ATP synthesis. In the recent decade, PSII-based biomimetic systems make significant progress, such
more » ... as artificial chloroplasts and photoelectrochemical cells. The biomimetic assembly approach helps PSII gather functions and properties from synthetic materials, which results in a complex with the components of partly natural and partly synthetic. Herein, PSII-based biomimetic assembly offers opportunities to forward semi-biohybrid research and synchronously inspire artificial light-harvest micro/nanodevices optimization. This review collects recent efforts about how PSII combines with artificial structures via molecular assembly and highlights PSII-based semi-natural biosystems which arise from synthetic parts and natural components. Moreover, we discuss the challenge and remaining problems within PSII-based systems and outlook their developments and applications in the future. We believe this topic can arouse new inspirations of rational designs to develop biomimetic PSII-based semi-natural devices and further reveal the secret of energy conversion within natural photosynthesis from the molecular level.
doi:10.1093/nsr/nwab051 pmid:34691712 pmcid:PMC8363332 fatcat:6xqwuqby7bcadcokqpymtgrdna