Carotenoids are ubiquitous and essential pigments in photosynthesis. They absorb in the blue-green region of the solar spectrum and transfer the absorbed energy to (bacterio-)chlorophylls, and so expand the wavelength range of light that is able to drive photosynthesis. This is an example of singlet-singlet energy transfer, and so carotenoids serve to enhance the overall efficiency of photosynthetic light reactions. Carotenoids also act to protect photosynthetic organisms from the harmful effects of excess exposure to light. Triplet-triplet energy transfer from chlorophylls to carotenoids plays a key role in this photoprotective reaction. In the light-harvesting pigment-protein complexes from purple photosynthetic bacteria and chlorophytes, carotenoids have an additional role of structural stabilization of those complexes. In this article we review what is currently known about how carotenoids discharge these functions. The molecular architecture of photosynthetic systems will be outlined first to provide a basis from which to describe carotenoid photochemistry, which underlies most of their important functions in photosynthesis.
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Department of Histology and Embryology, Faculty of Medicine, Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic.
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State Key Laboratory of Clean and Efficient Coal Utilization, Taiyuan University of Technology, Taiyuan 030024, China.
The low sulfur selectivity of Fe-based HS-selective catalytic oxidation catalysts is still a problem, especially at a high O content. This is alleviated here through anchoring FeO nanoclusters on UiO-66 via the formation of Fe-O-Zr bonds. The introduced FeO species exist in the form of Fe and Fe.
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January 2025
Department of Mechanical Engineering, National University of Singapore, Singapore 117575, Singapore.
The development of efficient sliding ferroelectric (FE) materials is crucial for advancing next-generation low-power nanodevices. Currently, most efforts focus on homobilayer two-dimensional materials, except for the experimentally reported heterobilayer sliding FE, MoS/WS. Here, we first screened 870 transition metal dichalcogenide (TMD) bilayer heterostructures derived from experimentally characterized monolayer TMDs and systematically investigated their sliding ferroelectric behavior across various stacking configurations using high-throughput calculations.
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Fujian Agriculture and Forestry University, College of Resources and Environment, CHINA.
Nanobiohybrids for solar-driven methanogenesis present a promising solution to the global energy crisis. However, conventional semiconductor-based nanobiohybrids face challenges such as limited tunability and poor biocompatibility, leading to undesirable spontaneous electron and proton transfer that compromise their structural stability and CH4 selectivity. Herein, we introduced eutectic gallium-indium alloys (EGaIn), featuring a self-limiting surface oxide layer surrounding the liquid metal core after sonication, integrated with Methanosarcina barkeri (M.
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January 2025
Department of Environment, Zhejiang University of Technology, Hangzhou, 310014, China.
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