Photosynthesis without β-carotene

第一作者：Xiaomin Yu

第一单位：阿姆斯特丹自由大学

通讯作者：Roberta Croce

 Abstract 

背景回顾：Carotenoids are essential in oxygenic photosynthesis: they stabilize the pigment–protein complexes, are active in harvesting sunlight and in photoprotection.

现有共识：In plants, they are present as carotenes and their oxygenated derivatives, xanthophylls. While mutant plants lacking xanthophylls are capable of photoautotrophic growth, no plants without carotenes in their photosystems have been reported so far, which has led to the common opinion that carotenes are essential for photosynthesis.

主要发现：Here, we report the first plant that grows photoautotrophically in the absence of carotenes: a tobacco plant containing only the xanthophyll astaxanthin.

结果1：Surprisingly, both photosystems are fully functional despite their carotenoid-binding sites being occupied by astaxanthin instead of β-carotene or remaining empty (i.e. are not occupied by carotenoids).

结果2：These plants display non-photochemical quenching, despite the absence of both zeaxanthin and lutein and show that tobacco can regulate the ratio between the two photosystems in a very large dynamic range to optimize electron transport.

 通讯作者 

doi: 10.7554/eLife.58984

Journal: eLife

Published date: Nov 03, 2020