Professor Diao Guowang & Dr. Sun Yan published noteworthy findings in Nature Communications: Stimulus-responsive light-harvesting complexes based on the pillararene-induced co-assembly of b-carotene and chlorophyll-Yangzhou University

PUBLISHED: 2016-07-12|READING:

Professor Diao Guowang and Dr. Sun Yan from the College of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering at Yangzhou University have published a pivotal paper in Nature Communications that has uncovered a new line of discovery regarding photocatalytic reaction studies.

As reported in their paper, entitled “Stimulus-responsive light-harvesting complexes based on the pillararene-induced co-assembly of b-carotene and chlorophyll,” the investigators concluded that the successful creation of HMS provides sophisticated strategies to generate carotenoids-based hierarchical model, which will result in innovative approaches to generate controllable supramolecular structures composed of carotenoids. The introduction of various biomolecules, could lead to the development of this supramolecular platform into diverse artificial biological cells for mimicking and optimizing photosynthetic systems, which would further provide a photosynthetic model and important tools for the investigation of the origins of the bioenergy system in living organisms.

The locations and arrangements of carotenoids at the subcellular level are responsible for their designated functions, which reinforces the necessity of developing methods for constructing carotenoid-based suprastructures beyond the molecular level. Because carotenoids lack the binding sites necessary for controlled interactions, functional structure based on carotenoids are not easily obtained. Here, we show that carotene-based suprastructures were formed via the induction of pillararene through a phase-transfer-mediated host–guest interaction. More importantly, similar to the main component in natural photosynthesis, complexes could be synthesized after chlorophyll was introduced into the carotene-based suprastructure assembly process. Remarkably, compared with molecular carotene or chlorophyll, this synthesized suprastructure exhibits some photocatalytic activity when exposed to light, which can be exploited for photocatalytic reaction studies of energy capture and solar conversion in living organisms.

Dr. Sun Yan and Professor Diao Guowang designed the experiments, analyzed the data, and co-wrote the paper.

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