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Solar panels from vegetable biomass

10.11.2021

A group of scientists from Finland, Sweden and Canada have explored ways to use lignocellulose, or plant biomass, to replace materials such as sand and plastic. According to research published in Advanced Materials, biomass can replace glass in solar panels, making them more efficient.

Lignocellulose is a combination of lignin (20-25%), hemicellulose (20-25%) and cellulose (45-50%). It is found in almost every plant on Earth, and completely new, usable materials can be created from purified and mechanically crushed biomass to a state of powder.

The researchers evaluated various characteristics of lignocellulose required for optical applications, including its transparency, reflectivity, and UV light filtering.

“We have been able to create light-reactive surfaces for windows. Lignocellulose can also be used to make UV protective films that act like sunscreen on surfaces,” says Kati Miettunen, professor of materials science at the University of Turku. By "tuning" the functionality of the material, the researchers hope to replace the glass in solar panels with it, which will improve the absorption of light and achieve higher efficiency of their work.

The main obstacle to the development and commercialization of innovations based on lignocellulose was the cost of their production. The useful properties of the material have been known since the early 2000s, but only now the energy consumption and the cost of production have decreased enough that its industrial use has become possible. The researchers argue that scaling up the use of biomass is possible by stimulating demand for renewable alternatives for optical applications.

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Slow life saves from deadly mutations 05.08.2019

If a mutation spoils some very important gene, then it would be natural to expect that with such a mutation the organism will not last long, and will die during embryonic development. On the other hand, there are cases when an important gene is simply absent in the genome, and this does not affect health in any way. Usually in such cases it is said that the genome is a system with a sufficiently high reliability, that genes can "insure" each other, and that the work of genes depends on the current context. One can imagine that the context was such that an important gene turned out to be unimportant, and a harmful mutation turned out to be harmless.

But context is too general a word. Scientists from Northwestern University (Chicago, USA) investigated one of the context options - metabolic rate. Experiments were performed with Drosophila larvae, in which a whole class of genes encoding microregulatory RNAs (miRNAs) was switched off. These RNAs are small molecules that interact with other "large" messenger RNAs and prevent them from synthesizing proteins. That is, miRNAs inhibit protein synthesis. In this role, they are very important just for individual development, when you need to constantly turn on some genes and proteins, and turn off others. And so all such miRNAs were turned off in Drosophila, and they expected that the flies would develop defects incompatible with life.

Indeed, it was so, but only in those fruit flies in which the metabolism proceeded at a normal rate. It was enough to slow down the metabolism at least by half (and for this, for example, it is enough to put flies on a starvation ration), as the negative effect of the missing regulatory RNAs almost disappeared. The organism did not seem to notice that a whole class of molecular genetic regulators had been taken away from it.

When interacting with each other, genes and proteins rely on feedback, when a signal from a partner helps to correct their own activity. But with a normal metabolism, feedback may not have time to work, which is why the role of assistant regulators is so important. If the metabolism slows down, then you can already do without them. It is likely that other dangerous mutations can also become harmless under changing environmental conditions, and this is probably one of the explanations for why abstinence in food helps to stay healthy longer - cells can afford to ignore some genetic problems.

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