Life in biophotovoltaics systems

Abstract

As the most suitable potential clean energy power generation technology, biophotovoltaics (BPV) not only inherits the advantages of traditional photovoltaics, such as safety, reliability and no noise, but also solves the disadvantages of high pollution and high energy consumption in the manufacturing process, providing new functions of self-repair and natural degradation. The basic idea of BPV is to collect light energy and generate electric energy by using photosynthetic autotrophs or their parts, and the core is how these biological materials can quickly and low-loss transfer electrons to the anode through mediators after absorbing light energy and generating electrons. In this mini-review, we summarized the biological materials widely used in BPV at present, mainly cyanobacteria, green algae, biological combinations (using multiple microorganisms in the same BPV system) and isolated products (purified thylakoids, chloroplasts, photosystem I, photosystem II), introduced how researchers overcome the shortcomings of low photocurrent output of BPV, pointed out the limitations that affected the development of BPV’ biological materials, and put forward reasonable assumptions accordingly.