Structure, Function and Utilization of Plant Photosynthetic Reaction Centers

Light capturing and energy conversion by PSI is one of the most fundamental processes in nature. In the heart of these adaptations stand PSI, PSII and their light harvesting antenna complexes. The main goal of this grant proposal was to obtain by X-ray crystallography information on the structure of plant photosystem I (PSI) and photosystem II (PSII) supercomplexes. We achieved several milestones along this line but as yet, like several strong laboratories around the world, we have no crystal structure of plant PSII. We have redesigned the purification and crystallization procedures and recently solved the crystal structure of the PSI supercomplex at 3.3 Å resolution. Even though this advance in resolution appears to be relatively small, we obtained a significantly improved model of the supercomplex. The work was published in J. Biol. Chem. (Amunts et al., 2010). The improved electron density map yielded identification and tracing of the PsaK subunit. The location of an additional 10 ß-carotenes, as well as 5 chlorophylls and several loop regions that were previously uninterruptable have been modeled. This represents the most complete plant PSI structure obtained thus far, revealing the locations of and interactions among 17 protein subunits and 193 non-covalently bound photochemical cofactors. We have continued extensive experimental efforts to improve the structure of plant PSI and to obtain PSII preparation amenable to crystallization. Most of our efforts were devoted to obtain well-defined subcomplexes of plant PSII preparations that are amenable to crystallization. We studied the apparent paradox of the high sensitivity of oxygen evolution of isolated thylakoids while BBY particles exhibit remarkable resilience to the same treatment. The integrity of the photosystem II (PSII) extrinsic protein complement as well as calcium effects arise from the Ca2+ atom associated with the site of photosynthetic water oxidation were investigated. This work provides deeper insights into the interaction of PsbO with PSII. Sight-directed mutagenesis indicated the location of critical sites involved in the stability of the water oxidation reaction. When combined with previous results, the data lead to a more detailed model for PsbO binding in eukaryotic PSII.