Green Human Project

So the company Applied Molecular Evolution is wanting us to create a human that is very energy efficient. This may seem a little difficult but all I plan on doing is comparing the way a human works and the way a plant works. Energy efficient is very important now days with the large amounts of pollutions and growth in population. This experiment can raise some good questions that I will try to answer and solve. Then I will see where I actually go from there.

1. How will light energy be captured? How do plants capture energy and what similar sorts of components would we have to build into our “green human?”  Would photosynthetic humans have to have green skin or could they be some other color? Will additional appendages be required for additional energy-collecting surface area and if so what form should they take? So the human will end up being the color green, since chlorophyll is green and the key ingredient to process of photosynthesis. If we had additional appendages, it could possible be easier for the human to collect some more energy. Since a plant with large leaves is able to collect more sunlight but if we were to lack for the extra arms or legs we could possibly need more light on the skin. So it can absorb and give us the energy we could be lacking. I believe this could make the most logical sense.
2. What sub-cellular structures (organelles) are required for photosynthesis and how does their structure promote the process of photosynthesis? Now this being yet another difficult task of actually being a green human, we would probably have to change our cells to work like a plant cell. By doing so we would need chloroplasts and like plants have, lager vacuoles..
3. How will the energy from energy-carrying molecules be used to create energy-storing molecules like glucose? What types of reactions do plants carry out and what are some of the enzymes that we will need to build into our photosynthetic humans? So as a green human we will need a place to our excess energy. A normal human tends to store all of their extra energy in their fat and if we could think of someone on the green human to store it would be great but instead of it being fat, it would be excess glucose. So thats a whole new problem considering the effects with osmosis so instead we would have to possible store the carbohydrates as glycogen. The way our body will be processing the glucose or sugars and that's where the enzymes come in. So in our body sugars break down in our digestive system quick and easy and since they do so we will not need as much enzymes to break the food down.
4. How will our photosynthetic humans use the energy stores (glucose) that they produce? What are the steps in normal human aerobic respiration that allow for release of energy from glucose? We plan to use the energy as a green human, the same as we do now, but we will produce extra and actually store it for later This is kind of like how you can save some of the solar energy from the panel, that way you have electricity at night. Possibly the green human would need more energy stored to carry out photosynthesis instead of respiration. So other than that it should be the same!
5. What public safety and/or ethical issues will need to be addressed during the completion of this project? Its only logical for there to be problems with an experiment like this for both ethically and safety. Some people wont believe in the idea of doing all of these different tests on humans, while others think it could be great. What if instead of helping global warming, it does the complete opposite. There are a lot of chances to take in this experiment but the outcome can be better then not trying it at all. 

So now that I am done with is Project I can honestly saying it was so bad after all! It's just took a lot of thinking but in the end it was actually kind of fun getting to mess around while being serious, al on the same page.