I've seen things you wouldn't believe, like an atom about to photosynthesize
Photosynthesis – the process by which plants and some other organisms convert sunlight to food – is complex, and scientists don't fully understand how it works. But a team of researchers led by the US Department of Energy's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory reckon they're closer to solving the mystery – they captured an image of the atoms inside cyanobacteria undergoing photosynthesis just as the tiny organism released oxygen.
X-ray lasers at SLAC's Linac Coherent Light Source at Stanford University, and the SPring-8 Angstrom Compact free electron LAser at a synchrotron radiation facility in Japan's SPring-8 lab, were directed at a specific protein used to catalyze the chemical reaction. The protein complex, dubbed Photosystem II, is used by organisms like cyanobacteria or algae to photosynthesize.
Photosystem II carries a molecule, made up of four manganese atoms and one calcium atom connected by oxygen atoms, and splits a water molecule apart to release oxygen. The research team managed to image the different steps in the reaction, and discovered a previously unknown step in the process. "Many of the steps in the reaction involve very small changes in the position of individual atoms and therefore we need to get very clear atomic pictures of the Photosystem II at the different times during the reaction," the team told. Zapping the cyanobacteria with the laser and measuring the diffraction patterns of the reflected beam allows researchers to build up an image of the positions of each of the atoms involved in photosynthesis.
Tens or even hundreds of thousands of these snapshots are required to see how the atoms move over time. Capturing them is a tedious process that constantly requires fresh cyanobacteria samples, since each one gets destroyed after being exposed to the powerful X-ray pulse. The experimental setup to facilitate the research took six years to build, as the authors explained in a study
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