As a clean and renewable energy source, hydrogen energy is an important development direction in the future. However, the traditional hydrogen production methods still consume a large amount of fossil energy, and the cost of the emerging electric/photochemical hydrogen production methods is generally higher. Biological hydrogen process can achieve both sewage treatment and production capacity, so it has better sustainability and development potential, but the traditional biological method is limited by low conversion efficiency. Using the ability of microorganisms to self-synthesize metal nanomaterials, Prof. Wenwei Li and his team from Suzhou Institute for Advanced Study at USTC have constructed a novel bio-photocatalytic composite system, which gives conventional dark fermentation microorganisms excellent light absorption ability.

The system fully combines the excellent photocatalytic performance of semiconductor materials with the advantages of high selectivity of biological cells and self-reproduction and regeneration. It can use both biological energy and light energy at the same time and significantly improves the efficiency of hydrogen production. An important feature of the system is to implement the intracellular self-assembled semiconductor nanomaterials, thus breaking the existing extracellular nano materials - cell composite systems across a membrane electron transport restrictions and synthetic nanomaterials biological compatibility constraints, not only than the existing system has higher utilization efficiency of optoelectronic (light energy conversion efficiency as high as 27.6%), Moreover, it could effectively use the intracellular metabolites to realize the effective removal of photogenerated holes, and its hydrogen production activity was increased by 2.6 times. The research of Prof. Li Wenwei's team provides new ideas for the sustainable production of hydrogen energy and is expected to be applied to the green synthesis of other fuels and chemicals.

Link：https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1385894721028357