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Abstract

Developing sustainable energy solutions is a multifaceted problem and requires a breadth of research ranging from the fundamental insights of materials for energy applications to the economic feasibility of technologies. Joule brings together research that spans scales as well as fields in order to highlight real-world solutions to the challenge of developing sustainable energy. Joule is a part of Cell Press, which has a long history of publishing outstanding life-science research, and bridges both the physical and life sciences toward solving global energy challenges. Sustainable energy has many standing challenges, such as the generation and storage of renewable energy and the capture, conversion, and utilization of CO2. Often, the methods taken to address the aforementioned challenges focus on the development of new materials for batteries, CO2 capture or reduction catalysts, low-carbon hydrogen production, solar cells, and other human-engineered approaches. Even though these strategies have yielded impressive results that have already become integral in our daily lives, such as Li-ion batteries or Si solar cells, in many cases, nature has already evolved solutions to these problems. For instance, plants and some microbes utilize sunlight to capture and convert CO2 into molecules that are useful for the organisms. By taking inspiration from nature or modifying organisms or molecules found in nature, solutions to some of the main challenges in energy research have been developed. Often, these approaches taken from nature can have inherent advantages of being more sustainable, limited in toxicity, scalable, operational under mild conditions (pH, temperature, and pressure), lower in initial costs, and smaller in physical footprint, and subsequently present viable solutions to the challenges that energy research aims to address. Like many of the other promising technologies, these approaches have their own downsides. However, renewable energy is a critical challenge facing the world that will require a variety of approaches, each with their own upsides and shortcomings, that will inevitably include biological and bio-inspired solutions as well as batteries and solar cells. In this issue of Joule, we are highlighting innovation at the biology-energy interface, spanning a range of topics and approaches. To begin with, Lenz and coauthors in their Perspective show how the conditions that nature creates lead to the degradation of solar cells. Meanwhile, Brudvig and coworkers provide insights into Photosystem II, which allows for a better understanding of photosynthesis and helps to pave the way for bio-inspired photosynthetic systems. Similarly, Wang and coauthors highlight the potential to improve the energy conversion of NAD(P)H, a co-factor that plays an important role in O2 photosynthesis, and how NAD(P)H can be used for photocatalytic energy conversions in reactors. Barstow and colleagues outline the possibilities of using electricity to power microbes for CO2 reduction. Meanwhile, Howe and coauthors highlight the potential of microbes to generate electricity. Gu and coworkers take a slightly different approach, using microbial photoelectrochemical systems to generate syngas from CO2 while simultaneously treating wastewater. Erşan and Park, meanwhile, discuss the potential of non-photosynthetic microbial reduction of CO2. Finally, Rieth and Nocera argue for a hybrid inorganic-biological approach that utilizes inorganic semiconductors for the solar parts of photosynthesis and then uses biological components to perform the conversion of CO2 to higher valued chemicals. This selection of papers demonstrates the rich potential of nature to address today’s energy challenges and hopefully inspires readers to look to nature for solutions and envision biotechnology as part of the future’s sustainable energy solutions.