Abstract
THE fluorescence intensity of a photosynthetic organism at any instant is a measure of the concentration of excited chlorophyll and it has, therefore, been one of the most studied of all the phenomena related to photosynthesis. Fluorescence lifetimes are a direct measure of the rate of energy transfer from the light collecting unit to the chemical trap. Lifetimes in the nanosecond region have been measured by many workers, following the pioneering work of Brody and Rabinowitch1, but these have been near the limit of time resolution of the apparatus used. Much shorter average lifetimes have been measured by phase shift methods2. The picosecond pulses which are available from mode-locked lasers have now made possible a fully time-resolved study of fluorescence decay in the photosynthetic units of algal chloroplasts and their fragments.
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BEDDARD, G., PORTER, G., TREDWELL, C. et al. Fluorescence lifetimes in the photosynthetic unit. Nature 258, 166–168 (1975). https://doi.org/10.1038/258166a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/258166a0
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