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Anaerobic photosynthetic bacteria have the capacity to produce significant amounts of H2 by using sunlight. This H2 can be produced either by hydrogenising or nitrogenising. The bacteria use reductant derived either from solar powered reactions or the oxidation of organic compounds to drive H2 production.

To mimic the photosynthetic reactions in artificial photosynthetic systems, the following should be accomplished first:

1) Finding the appropriate compromise between the complexity of the biological system and a simplified structure of an artificial photosynthetic system, taking into account the crucial elements of the active site.

2) To sample parameter space in an economical way to find the most rapid convergence to desired systems and to overcome the time scale limitations in the simulations.

Genetically engineering real plants. Genetically engineering real plants and microorganisms to yield the products we want. Ethanol would be the preferred one.

Attention is focusing on one of the most ancient groups of organism, the cyanobacteria. Dramatic progress has been made over the last decade understanding the fundamental reaction of photosynthesis that evolved in cyanobacteria 3.7 billion years ago, which for the first time used water molecules as a source of electrons to transport energy derived from sunlight, while converting carbon dioxide into oxygen.

Current energy production from biomass has a low efficiency due to energy losses at various levels in cellular metabolism. However, this process has the attractive feature of automatic self-reproduction, so that for the long term energy budget it is not necessary to invest energy in renewing the photosynthetic apparatus.