How did living organisms use sunlight? There are several types of photosynthetic reactions that convert sunlight to biological energy with varying degrees of efficiency and release different by-products. All of them use energetic photons newly arrived from the sun to goose electrons inside light-sensitive molecules such as chlorophyll. This gives the electrons such a shock that they jump out of their home atoms and then get kidnapped, wriggling all the time, by proteins. The proteins pass the high-energy
