Molecular Photosynthesis Research Facilitating Technology Development Towards Enhanced Indoor Farming

Abstract

Plants harness light energy through photosynthesis, a biological process that converts electromagnetic radiation into chemical form and drives CO2 fixation to produce biomass. Photosynthetic machinery, the engine of the process, is a complex network of protein assemblies that function in plant chloroplasts and control the energy conversion process under constantly changing environmental conditions. This machinery is responsible for practically all food production on Earth, yet the molecular details and constraints that affect the overall energy efficiency are often ignored in the context of farming applications. This review is targeted at a wide audience and provides insight into the basic mechanistic concepts of photosynthesis and how these connect plant growth, conditional acclimation and efficiency. We aim to explain how different lights affect the photosynthetic performance and interlink with other environmental variables, and discuss why this should be taken into account under artificial conditions. We believe that a science-based view of future development that takes advantage of the molecular level knowledge on photosynthesis can be used for improved research equipment design and in commercial indoor farming applications with LED light technology and automated condition control. This requires fluent interdisciplinary communication from engineers who design research instrumentation to software developers and modelling experts involved in biological data processing. To advance this collaboration, we hope that this review serves as a bridge for those who are entering the field of molecular photosynthesis research, or people who are not specialised in plant science, but use or develop indoor farming and LED technologies.