Scientists see chlorophyll in new light

摘要

Sydney scientists have made a serendipitous discovery - a new type of chlorophyll which uses low energy infrared light. Dr Min Chen and colleagues from the University of Sydney were looking for chlorophyll d which was found within a cyano-bacterium in 1996 and shown to use light at 710nm, just outside the visible spectrum. However, they came across chlorophyll f within stromatolites - rock-like structures built by photosynthetic cyanobacteria - by accident.