One critical question facing proponents of a hydrogen economy, the term tossed around for a nation that's switched from fossil fuels to hydrogen fuel cells and hydrogen combustion engines, is how to produce the hydrogen.  Current schemes require either expensive catalysts or require a secondary power source such as solar power.  However, solar power doesn't come cheaply itself.

Researchers are racing to find a cheaper way to produce solar energy.  One of the top ideas is to borrow from nature's highly refined solar energy capture system found in plants.  Scientists at MIT are building on past work, which used naturally occurring chemicals from photosynthetic organisms to directly convert solar power to split water and create stored hydrogen gas.  The MIT researchers have upped the ante by creating a virus to automate the difficult assembly of the necessary chemicals.  This could eventually make biochemical solar cells a viable and less expensive alternative to traditional panel designs.

Angela Belcher, the Germeshausen Professor of Materials Science and Engineering and Biological Engineering, led a team which modified a common, harmless bacterial virus called M13 to attract and bind with molecules of a catalyst (the team used iridium oxide) and a biological pigment (zinc porphyrins).

The bound compounds turned the virus into a mini-antenna, similar to the molecules found in plants that are responsible for absorbing water.  Energy absorbed by the virus was able to very efficiently split water in to oxygen and hydrogen gases.

Left free, the viruses would clump together and stop efficiently processing water.  However, the researchers took the extra step of embedding them in a hydrogel to prevent clumping.

The key to this work is that the researchers used a virus to assemble them.  States Professor Belcher, "We use components people have used before, but we use biology to organize them for us, so you get better efficiency."

Thomas Mallouk, the DuPont Professor of Materials Chemistry and Physics at Pennsylvania State University comments on the study, "This is an extremely clever piece of work that addresses one of the most difficult problems in artificial photosynthesis, namely, the nanoscale organization of the components in order to control electron transfer rates."

The work from Belcher's team was published in the journal Nature Nanotechnology.

The next goal is to create a self-sustaining and durable prototype within the next two years.

With such a prototype, some day it might be possible to produce pigments in bacteria via viral infection, use the viruses in this study to assemble the pigments and finally add the catalyst, to form a quick, biologically produced, and efficient solar hydrogen production unit.