Tobacco plants could help wean the world from fossil fuels, according to scientists from the University of California, Berkeley. In a paper in the journal ACS Nano Letters, Matt Francis and his colleagues used genetically engineered bacteria to produce the building blocks for artificial photovoltaic and photochemical cells. The technique could be more environmentally friendly than traditional methods of making solar cells and could lead to cheap, temporary and biodegradable solar cells. ‘Over billions of years, evolution has established exactly the right distances between chromophore to allow them to collect and use light from the sun with unparalleled efficiency,’ said Francis. ‘We are trying to mimic these finely tuned systems using the tobacco mosaic virus.’ Synthetic solar cells don’t just grow on tobacco plants. They have to be programmed to grow on tobacco plants. Reprogramming every cell of a mature tobacco plant would be a massive undertaking for human scientists. For the tobacco mosaic virus, however, reprogramming adult tobacco cells to produce tiny structures the plant normally would not make is what the virus does best. The scientists tweak a few genes in the virus, spray it over a crop of tobacco plants, and wait. […]