. Space Industry and Business News .  Lab-made complexes are
"sun sponges" by Staff Writers St. Louis MO (SPX) Aug 26, 2013
Graduate student Michelle Harris and research scientist Darek
Niedzwiedzki in PARC's Ultrafast Laser Facility. The laser setup
allows them to measure energy transfer steps among pigments in
light-harvesting antennas that take place in a trillionth of a
second. Image courtesy Angeles/WUSTL.   The scientists who made
it call it a testbed, or platform for rapid prototyping of
light-harvesting antennas-structures found in plants and
photosynthesizing bacteria-that take the first step in
converting sunlight into usable energy. The antennas consist of
protein scaffolding that holds pigment molecules in ideal
positions to capture and transfer the sun's energy.  The number
and variety of the pigment molecules determines how much of the
sun's energy the antennas can grab and dump into an energy trap.
In the online edition of Chemical Science, a new publication of
the Royal Society of Chemistry,