Electrochemical Harvesting of Photosynthetic Electrons from Unicellular Algae Population at the Preparative Scale by Using 2,6-dichlorobenzoquinone

Abstract

Oxygenic photosynthesis is the process used by plants, cyanobacteria or algae to convert the solar energy into a chemical one from the carbon dioxide reduction and water oxidation. In the past years, many strategies were implemented to take benefits from the overall low yield of this process to extract photosynthetic electrons and thus produce a sustainable photocurrent. In practice, electrochemical tools were involved and the principle of electrons harvestings was related to the step of electron transfer between the photosynthetic organism and a collecting electrode. In this context, works involving an algae population in suspension were rather scarce and rather focus on the grafting of the photosynthetic machinery at the electrode surface. Based on our previous works, we report here the implementation of an electrochemical set-up at the preparative scale to produce photocurrents. An algae suspension, i.e. an intact biological system to ensure culture and growth, was involved in presence of a centimeter-sized carbon gauze as the collecting electrode. The spectroelectrochemical cell contains 16mL of suspension of a Chlamydomonas reinhardtii mutant with an appropriate mediator (2,6-DCBQ). Under these conditions, stable photocurrents were recorded over 1h whose magnitude depends on the quinone concentration and the light illumination.