The plans and the organizations of the meeting and that

of the special issue have benefited from advice provided by George Espie, Brian Colman, and Dean Price. The first “CCM” meeting was held at Asilomer, USA in 1984 soon after the discovery of direct accumulation systems of inorganic carbon check details in cyanobacteria and green algae. The original aim was to promote the study on acquisition systems of inorganic carbon by aquatic photoautotrophs and to shed light on the importance of carbon fixation in aquatic environments. Five subsequent meetings were held at Kingston, Canada (1990), Vancouver, Canada (1997), Cairns, Australia (2001), St. Sauveur, Canada (2004),

and Malaga, Spain (2007), while this seventh symposium, CCM7, was the first to be held in Asia. Special issues of all past meetings have been published (Lucas and Berry 1985; APR-246 clinical trial Colman 1991, 1998; Price and Badger 2002; Espie and Colman 2005; Gordillo 2008) and this issue of the Photosynthesis Research is the collection of papers representing the seventh milestone in the developments selleck chemicals llc of our knowledge, both basic and applied, of CO2 concentrating mechanism and CO2 responses in aquatic photoautotrophs. Three decades of research have demonstrated the general occurrences of CCMs in a wide range of bacteria and algae living in freshwater and seawater,

and ecophysiological impacts of aquatic photoautotrophs. Moreover, the establishment of why genome databases in model systems of cyanobacteria, green algae, and diatoms, together with reverse genetic approaches are providing molecular details of the factors controlling the uptakes and flow of inorganic carbon. These findings allow us to consider that algal primary production can be adapted to provide a crucial source of renewable energy and that some components of algal CCMs might be transferred by gene manipulation to higher plants in order to improve crop yield. The symposium was initiated by the plenary talk of one of the pioneers of this research field, Shigetoh Miyachi (Professor Emeritus, University of Tokyo). He described his 60 years of research on algal physiology. Sessions started with talks on molecular studies of the CCM in cyanobacteria, Chlamydomonas and marine diatoms, followed by more physiological works in haptophytes and marine macrophytes. Topics then changed to metabolic controls in chloroplasts including studies aiming at biofuel productions and then moved on to eco- and geo-scale studies of algal physiology and diatom genomics.