WHO wants a dead battery? Dollops of green goo made of the material of life – from jellyfish to fireflies – are now being recruited to produce electricity.
Zackary Chiragwandi at Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden, and colleagues have built a fuel cell powered by stuff taken from living cells. First, they made a photovoltaic device based on green fluorescent protein (GFP) from the jellyfish Aequorea victoria. They deposited two aluminium electrodes with a tiny gap between them onto a silicon dioxide substrate and then added a droplet of GFP on top, whereupon the protein assembled itself into strands…
