Artificial leaves use sunlight to produce medicine.

The artificial leaf resembles a tiny solar power plant, focusing light onto molecules to trigger chemical reactions that produce medicine.

Artificial leaves use solar energy to trigger a chemical reaction that produces medicine. Photo: Seeker.

Leafy plants are miraculous factories capable of converting solar energy into chemical energy through photosynthesis. Since Giacomo Ciamician published his first photochemical experiment in 1886, scientists have been searching for ways to replicate photosynthesis, according to Seeker.

A research team at Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands combined a luminescent solar concentrator (LSC) with tiny tubes running through it to create a leaf-shaped power plant. The LSC material concentrates sunlight energy onto chemicals flowing through the tubes to trigger the necessary chemical reactions. The device converts the input chemical into a different output chemical, which could be a drug or fuel. The research results were published in the journal Angewandte Chemie on December 21st.

"The miniature power plant mimics the processes that occur inside a leaf. The research team designed the power plant to resemble a red maple leaf, although the shape of the device does not affect its function," said Timothy Noël, the lead researcher.

This breakthrough promises to create small-scale, on-demand chemical manufacturing plants anywhere in the world. We can inject the appropriate chemicals into leaves, using solar energy to produce the desired compounds for the drug.

"Even when we conducted the experiment on a cloudy day, the amount of chemical obtained was still 40% higher than in a similar experiment that did not use LSC material," Noel said.

According to VNE