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IT Excellence at Illinois: News

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  • Simulation Reveals how Bacterial Organelle Converts Sunlight to Chemical Energy

    Image is a graphic of a chromatophore, which appears as a brown textured orb with circular patterns of blue, green, and teal on it. It is floating in a blue background that looks like water, and two similar orbs are out of focus behind it.

    Researchers used supercomputers to construct a 136 million-atom model of the chromatophore, a primitive light-harvesting structure in purple bacteria. The simulated organelle behaved just as it does in nature, the team reports. Graphic by Christopher Maffeo.

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