alternative energy creation
For most of the history of biology, plants and animals have been thought of as autotrophs and heterotrophs, respectively. “Autotrophs” are those organisms which provide their own food sources. Plants do this by capturing sunlight and doing a process called photosynthesis. (Carbon dioxide + Water → Carbohydrates + Oxygen) “Heterotrophs” are organisms which consume other organisms for food. Thus, whether animals are herbivores, omnivores or carnivores, they are eating other organisms to acquire their energy.
For most of biology, we have generally classified organisms into these categories. But with some exceptions we have called “photoheterotrophs” or “mixotrophs.” Most corals, for example, can both synthesize energy from sunlight as well as consume organisms like plankton. Another example is the Venus flytrap and other insect-eating plants that can derive energy both from sunlight and from the organisms they consume. More examples include some types of non-sulfur bacteria, heliobacteria, many types of plankton, and even many types of insects. But of course, humans have always been conceptualized as purely “heterotrophs.” We need to eat plants and animals of various kinds to get our energy.
Hundreds of studies have now found that human cells—the mitochondria in our cells—do actually produce more ATP when exposed to red/NIR light! And it even goes further than that… A recent study has actually found that other organisms—including mammals that are biologically very similar to humans (like rodents and pigs)—have now been shown to be capable of taking up chlorophyll metabolites into their mitochondria, and using those metabolites to capture sunlight energy and amplify cellular energy production!
The research suggests that some animals can use these chlorophyll metabolites to speed up the rate of energy production and increase the overall volume of ATP produced by fairly large amounts in many cases. This revolutionary discovery was published in 2014 in the Journal of Cell Science in a study titled “Light-harvesting chlorophyll pigments enable mammalian mitochondria to capture photonic energy and produce ATP.”
Here is a chunk of the abstract from this fascinating study, where researchers succinctly summarized their findings: “Sunlight is the most abundant energy source on this planet. However, the ability to convert sunlight into biological energy in the form of adenosine-59-triphosphate (ATP) is thought to be limited to chlorophyll-containing chloroplasts in photosynthetic organisms. Here we show that mammalian mitochondria can also capture light and synthesize ATP when mixed with a light-capturing metabolite of chlorophyll.”
Ref: Sommer A.P. et al. (2015). Light Effect on Water Viscosity: Implication for ATP Biosynthesis