Thanks to an experiment, scientists have discovered that photosynthesis, a key process for life on Earth, begins with a single photon.
Thanks to a complex process made of pigments, proteins, enzymes and metal coenzymes, plants can convert sunlight into chemical energy for life. It’s photosynthesisone of the most important processes for life on Earth. If it didn’t happen, in fact, we wouldn’t even be here, but the crazy thing is that you need a good dose of luck and many different factors to create the conditions for photosynthesis on a planet like Earth.
Advertisement
And now, thanks to an experiment described in a study in Nature, we know that this organic chemical reaction is sensitive to the smallest amount of light possible: a single photon. The discovery consolidates our current understanding of photosynthesis and will help us answer questions at smaller scales, where quantum physics and biology meet.
The details of the experiment
“An enormous amount of work, theoretically and experimentally, has been done around the world trying to understand what happens after a photon . But we realized that no one ever talked about the first step. This was still a question that needed to be answered in detail,” said study author Graham Fleming of Berkeley Lab.
It all starts with a single photon
In the experiment Fleming and his collaborator Birgitta Whaley demonstrated that a single photon can actually initiate the first step of photosynthesis photosynthesis. Because all photosynthetic organisms use similar processes and share an evolutionary ancestor, the team is confident that photosynthesis in plants and algae works the same way for other living things.
