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Abstract
Photosystem I (PSI) is a transmembrane protein complex that uses incident light energy to drive an energetically unfavorable electron transfer reaction across a membrane in the early steps of oxygenic photosynthesis. This electron transfer reaction provides energy for the fixing of carbon dioxide and for the subsequent synthesis of nearly all biological material on Earth. Despite the morphological variety of oxygenic photosynthetic organisms—ranging from single-celled aquatic cyanobacteria to large, complex terrestrial plants—the structure and function of PSI are remarkably well-conserved across phyla. PSI has been the subject of extensive interdisciplinary research involving fields ranging from molecular genetics to condensed matter physics, and many aspects of its function still remain unclear.
This study presents a variety of theoretical and experimental approaches to aspects of PSI structure and dynamics. An atomic-level structural model of higher plant PSI has been constructed based on recent protein crystal structures, and provides insight into the evolution of eukaryotic PSI. Time-resolved optical spectroscopic studies of PSI supercomplexes from the green freshwater alga Chlamydomonas reinhardtii illustrate how this organism adapts its photosynthetic apparatus to deal with changing environmental conditions and highlight the importance of structure-function relationships in light-harvesting systems.
A novel computational approach using constrained geometric simulations has been used to model a portion of the PSI assembly process, shedding some light on how the heterodimeric PSI reaction center evolved from the more ancient homodimeric photosynthetic reaction centers found in green sulfur bacteria and heliobacteria. A new method is also demonstrated in which constrained geometric simulations are used to flexibly fit a high-resolution protein structure to a low-resolution density map obtained with cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM) or low-resolution x-ray crystallography. This method is tested on computationally-generated density maps of adenylate kinase and lactoferrin as well as previously-published cryo-EM snaps of the bacterial chaperonin GroEL.
