Artificial leaves use sunlight to create drugs

Artificial leaves resemble a tiny solar plant, focusing light on molecules to trigger chemical reactions that produce drugs.

Leafy plants are miraculous plants capable of converting sunlight energy into chemical energy through photosynthesis. Since Giacomo Ciamician published his first photochemistry experiment in 1886, scientists are always looking for ways to reproduce photosynthesis, Seeker said.

Artificial leaves use the sun's light energy to trigger chemical reactions that produce the drug. Photo: Seeker.

A team at the Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands combined the LSC with tiny tubes running through it to create a leaf-shaped power plant. LSC materials will focus the sun's energy on chemicals flowing through the pipes to trigger the necessary chemical reactions. The device converts the chemical at the input into another chemical at the outlet. That could be a drug or fuel. The study was published in the Angewandte Chemie on December 21.

"Small power plants mimic the processes that occur inside a leaf." The research team shaped the power plant to look like a maple leaf, although the shape of the device did not affect its function. " Says lead researcher Timothy Noël.

This breakthrough promises to create small, customized chemical plants anywhere in the world. We can put appropriate chemicals in the leaves, using the sun's energy to create compounds in the desired drug.

"Even when we experimented on a cloudy day, the amount of chemicals collected was still 40% higher than in the same experiment without LSC ," Noel said.