Producing hydrogen from water is the stuff of science fiction. But the team at Imperial College London and Japan Science and Technology Corp. in Yokohama said they had taken the best pictures yet of the plant structures that do it every day. They used high-resolution x-ray crystallography to make an image of the tiny atomic splitter that separates the two hydrogen atoms from an oxygen atom in a water molecule.
“Results by other groups, including those obtained using lower resolution x-ray crystallography at 3.7 angstroms have shown that the splitting of water occurs at a catalytic center that consists of four manganese atoms,” said So Iwata of Imperial's Department of Biological Sciences.