Blankenship (USA), Ralph Bock (Germany), Julian Eaton-Rye (New Zealand), Wayne Frasch (USA), Johannes Messinger (Sweden), Masahiro Sugiura (Japan), Davide Zannni (Italy), and Lixin Zhang (China). In view of inclusion of “Bioenergy and Related Processes” to the title of our Series, we seek suggestions of names of scientists who may be suitable for the future Board of Consulting Editors. Govindjee and I thank all who have served as editors or authors and hope that photosynthesis research will benefit for many years because of the community

effort to document A dvances in P hotosynthesis and R espiration Including Bioenergy and Related Processes.”
“Introduction learn more Natural photosynthesis achieves the conversion of solar energy with a remarkably small set of cofactors. this website photosynthetic proteins use (bacterio)chlorophylls (BChls) and carotenoids (Car) both for light-harvesting and charge separation,

implying that the functional programming of the pigment chromophores is encoded in their conformation, local environment, and dynamics and is not due to their chemical structure per se. While the architecture of the photosynthetic reaction centers that leads to directional electron transfer is common to all photosynthetic organisms, there is much to be learned about the structure–function relations from the variability in photosynthetic antenna systems, as evolution has led to fundamentally different architectures for harvesting the light, depending on the variability of environmental sun light conditions. One intriguing puzzle that is currently Selleck INK1197 attracting widespread attention is the molecular basis underlying the photophysical mechanism of nonphotochemical quenching (NPQ), a photoprotective switching mechanism that Inositol monophosphatase 1 protects oxygenic species at high sun light conditions while optimally photosynthesizing at

low light intensities. During the past three decades, many structures of photosynthetic membrane proteins have been resolved at high resolution by crystallography, but the details of the structure–function interactions and how cofactors are programmed for their function remain to be elucidated. Solid-state NMR may not outperform crystallography for resolving membrane protein structures, but the technique has compelling advantages when it comes to resolving atomic details of pigment–protein interactions in a flexible protein environment. Better understanding of the structure–function motifs across antenna complexes and photosynthetic species in an evolutionary context will provide knowledge on common denominators of functional mechanisms in natural photosynthetic systems. This will guide the design of novel artificial constructs in which dye molecules are preprogrammed in the ground state by engineering of their scaffolding environment to perform the different tasks of light harvesting, charge separation, and photoprotection (de Groot 2012).