FIRST MAN MADE LEAF

JULIAN MELCHIORRI

Building in populated cities

" I extracted chloroplasts from plant cells and placed them inside this silk protein. As an outcome I have the first photosynthetic material that is living and breathing as a leaf does"

Plants use photosynthesis to produce energy at nearly 100% efficiency.

"..while it may possibly be true that silk proteins stabilize chloroplast function somehow, proteins in a cell are in a constant state of turnover (some more than others) and eventually (on the scale of hours or perhaps days), the system will inactivate. In isolated chloropolasts spread out on silk, no new nuclear-encoded proteins can be accessed. And as most of the proteins in the chloroplast need to be important, the life of an isolated chloroplast is necessarily short-lived. So, it won’t be surviving long enough to be useful for a space mission, I’m afraid," said Dr. Vermaas

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• http://inhabitat.com/man-made-leaf-can-make-oxygen-with-just-water-and-ligh...
• http://www.zmescience.com/ecology/green-living/silk-leaf-first-biological-l...

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