All photosynthetic organisms contain light-harvesting antenna complexes and electron transfer complexes called reaction centers. Some photosynthetic bacteria contain large (~100 MDa) peripheral antenna complexes known as chlorosomes. Chlorosomes lose their reaction center when they are extracted from organisms. Lead sulfide (PbS) quantum dots (QDs) were used for artificial reaction centers. Successive ionic layer adsorption and reaction (SILAR) allows different sizes of PbS QDs with different cycles to be easily deposited onto the nanostructured columnar titanium dioxide (TiO2) film with single crystal. Chlorosomes were sequentially deposited onto the PbS QDs surface by electrospray. Compared to the typical PbS QD sensitized solar cells, overall energy conversion efficiency increased with the Förster resonance energy transfer (FRET) effect between PbS QDs and chlorosomes.

Polymeric materials are widely used in power generation and energy storage applications. Deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) biopolymer-based hybrids have been found to display interesting electrical characteristics, such as a relatively high dielectric constant, good resistivity and dielectric breakdown behavior, and are promising as insulating dielectrics for capacitor applications. This research describes the processing, test structure design, and electrical characterization of DNA-sol-gel hybrids for energy storage applications.

Combinatorial phage display with a pVIII library of M13 bacteriophage was used to identify a peptide sequence capable of recognition and mineralization of copper sulfide. The six sequences isolated from the final biopanning round were rich in basic, hydrophobic, and polar amino acids compared to the phage display library. The peptide sequence, DTRAPEIV, was used to biomineralize copper sulfide on the pVIII major coat protein thus producing linear chains of nanoparticles. Electron microscopy revealed that the phage was capable of controlling the size of the nucleated nanoparticles in an aqueous solution at room temperature and that the mineralized material was copper sulfide. Phage-templated biomineralization is a low temperature, aqueous-based approach to synthesis of copper sulfide nanoparticles with hierarchical order.