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Engineered Tobacco Plants Grow Synthetic Solar Cells  

When it comes to energy efficiency, there’s still no substitute for millions upon millions of years of evolution. Scientists at UC Berkeley have found a way to hack common tobacco plants to grow synthetic photovoltaic and photochemical cells that can be extracted, dissolved in solution and sprayed onto a glass or plastic substrate to create solar panels. That’s the idea, anyhow.

Eons of living on earth have made plants very efficient gatherers of sunlight, so the researchers genetically programmed a virus that can infect a tobacco crop. But rather than replicating genetic copies of itself like a normal virus, this one causes the plant to manufacture artificial chromosphores, tiny structures that turn sunlight into high-powered electrons.

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