PHOTOSYNTHETICA

Photosynthetica 2025,63(4):374-384 | DOI: 10.32615/ps.2025.035

Twenty years of the International Conferences on Photosynthesis and Hydrogen Energy Research for Sustainability

A.W.D. LARKUM¹, R. SUBRAMANYAM², G. GOVINDJEE³, S.I. ALLAKHVERDIEV^{4, 5}

¹ Climate Change Cluster, University of Technology Sydney, NSW 2007, Australia

² Department of Plant Sciences, School of Life Sciences, University of Hyderabad, Gachibowli, 500046 Hyderabad, India

³ Department of Plant Biology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL 61801, USA

⁴ К.A. Timiryazev Institute of Plant Physiology RAS, Botanicheskaya Street 35, 127276 Moscow, Russia

⁵ Faculty of Engineering and Natural Sciences, Bahçeşehir University, Istanbul, Turkey

The International Conference on "Photosynthesis and Hydrogen Energy Research" was inaugurated in 2004 in Trois Rivières, Canada, as "Photosynthesis and Post-Genomics Era". It was conceived by its founders, Suleyman I. Allakhverdiev (Russia), Vyacheslav (Slava) Klimov (Russia), Robert Carpentier (Canada), and Prasanna Mohanty (India) to be an alternating conference to the bigger International Congress on Photosynthesis, which was then held every three years. The name was changed to the International Conference on Photosynthesis (ICP) in 2011. In 2013, "Hydrogen Production" was added, and then finally the current name, "International Conference on Photosynthesis and Hydrogen Energy Research for Sustainability", was used in 2015. The conferences over the last twenty years have been held in three continents - North America, Europe, and Asia - and have been very successful in attracting participants with the latest ideas in photosynthesis, hydrogen production, and energy sustainability. Here we describe all 12 conferences, with details of the major events of each conference.

Major points of the conference were: (1) Recent advances in the understanding of the basic mechanisms of water splitting (photosystem II) and the reactions around photosystem I in photosynthetic organisms. (2) The role of hydrogen production in photosynthesis. (3) The role of innovations in photosynthesis and hydrogen production in the development of global sustainability.

Additional key words: artificial photosynthesis; biotechnology; energy sustainability; global climate change; hydrogen production.

Received: October 22, 2025; Revised: October 22, 2025; Accepted: November 27, 2025; Published: December 31, 2025  Show citation