PT - JOURNAL ARTICLE AU - Buz Barstow TI - Molecular Mechanisms for the Biological Storage of Renewable Energy AID - 10.1101/028381 DP - 2016 Jan 01 TA - bioRxiv PG - 028381 4099 - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2016/03/20/028381.short 4100 - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2016/03/20/028381.full AB - Recent and ongoing discoveries in the field of extracellular electron transport offer the potential to electrically power highly flexible, carbon-fixing microbial metabolisms and generate a rich variety of chemicals and fuels. This process, electrosynthesis, creates the opportunity to use biology for the low cost storage of renewable electricity and the synthesis of fuels that produce no net carbon dioxide. This article highlights recent discoveries on the molecular machinery underpinning electrosynthesis and reviews recent work on the energy conversion efficiency of photosynthesis to begin to establish a framework to quantify the overall energy storage and conversion efficiency of electrosynthesis.