By Erin Blakemore, Source: Modern Farmer

In a recent study, an international team of chemists and physicists have taken the first “snapshots” of photosynthesis in action—the process plants use to convert light into chemical energy. This is big news for science, and even bigger news for cleantech, which has long been searching for a way to provide even cleaner energy.

In experiments recently documented in Nature, the scientists shield spinach leaves they buy at the market in a cool, protected room where a sun-like laser activates photosynthesis. They then take a “snapshot” of sorts using a special X-ray. We’ve known since the 19th century that leaves absorb light, then convert it into sugars, but it’s taken a bit longer to learn about the actual chemical and physical processes that ultimately produce photosynthetic reactions. Suffice it to say that involves a very long chain reaction of physical and chemical processes that allows plants to use sunlight (photo) to create and store energy in synthesized sugars (synthesis). And we still don’t fully understand everything behind the process that gives plants their food and humans their oxygen.

Read the full article at: Modern Farmer