The products of photosynthesis are easy to point out. Plants, algae and cyanobacteria create the air we breathe and the fuel for food webs as they turn carbon dioxide and water into oxygen and sugars. How photosynthesis works, though, is much harder to pin down.
Photosynthesis appears to have a lot in common with a Rube Goldberg machine: surprising dependencies, intricate connections, and many, many moving parts. A lot of these moving parts are proteins — amino acid structures that harvest light, transport molecules and regulate reactions. Identifying these proteins and then figuring out what they are doing is difficult. Proteins are tiny, invisible to even the most powerful light microscope, and fickle, often hiding their function from even the most determined scientist.
Recent work in Nature Communications takes on the challenge of understanding one of these proteins — and its role in photosynthesis — in the cyanobacterium Synechocystis. Through an array of experiments at universities and national user facilities, researchers found that this protein detects iron and fine-tunes energy production, allowing cyanobacteria to quickly adapt to their environment.
“The protein we studied is a very interesting regulator that can make the link between photosynthesis, respiration and high-iron homeostasis,” said Nicolas Grosjean, the first author of this paper. Grosjean is a research scientist at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Joint Genome Institute (JGI), a DOE Office of Science User Facility located at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab). Read more at the JGI website.
