Antenna complex

Cryo-EM reveals an asymmetric bacterial photosynthetic supercomplex built upon a homodimeric reaction center core. The structure provides mechanistic insights into light excitation transfer and a possible evolutionary transition intermediate of photosynthetic machinery.

Cryogenic electron microscopy structures of the Synechocystis phycobilisome—alone and bound with orange carotenoid protein—reveal detailed information regarding the biophysical basis of the control of cyanobacterial light harvesting.

Some cyanobacteria acclimate to far-red light by integrating chlorophyll f into their photosystems. Additional chlorophylls typically slow down charge separation but here the authors show that charge separation in chlorophyll-f-containing Photosystem II is faster in the presence of red-shifted allophycocyanin antennas.

Multimode vibronic mixing in model photosynthetic systems revealed by numerically exact simulations is shown to strongly modify linear and non-linear optical responses and facilitate the persistence of coherent dynamics.

Fucoxanthin chlorophyll a/c-binding proteins (FCPs) harvest light energy in diatoms. The authors analyzed a structure of PSII-FCPII supercomplex at high resolution by cryo-EM, which identified each FCP subunit and pigment network in the supercomplex.