Journal
PLANT JOURNAL
Volume 103, Issue 2, Pages 584-603Publisher
WILEY
DOI: 10.1111/tpj.14751
Keywords
Chlamydomonas; algae; photosynthesis; light-harvesting antenna; chlorophyll; thylakoid; non-photochemical quenching; biofuels
Categories
Funding
- Photosynthetic Antenna Research Center (PARC), an Energy Frontier Research Center - US Department of Energy, Office of Science, Basic Energy Sciences [DE-SC0001035]
- Bioenergy Technologies Office (BETO) [DE-EE0006316]
- PACE (Producing Algae for Coproducts and Energy) [DE-EE0007089]
- US Air Force-Office of Scientific Research [FA9550-08-1-0451]
- Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, KAKENHI [16H06553]
- Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, through the Network of Centers of Carbon Dioxide Resource Studies in Plants
- DOE [EE00030406]
- Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) Laboratory Directed Research & Development (LDRD) [20120535ER]
- Schools of Integrative Biology and of Molecular and Cell Biology of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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One of the major factors limiting biomass productivity in algae is the low thermodynamic efficiency of photosynthesis. The greatest thermodynamic inefficiencies in photosynthesis occur during the conversion of light into chemical energy. At full sunlight the light-harvesting antenna captures photons at a rate nearly 10 times faster than the rate-limiting step in photosynthetic electron transport. Excess captured energy is dissipated by non-productive pathways including the production of reactive oxygen species. Substantial improvements in photosynthetic efficiency have been achieved by reducing the optical cross-section of the light-harvesting antenna by selectively reducing chlorophyll b levels and peripheral light-harvesting complex subunits. Smaller light-harvesting antenna, however, may not exhibit optimal photosynthetic performance in low or fluctuating light environments. We describe a translational control system to dynamically adjust light-harvesting antenna sizes for enhanced photosynthetic performance. By expressing a chlorophyllide a oxygenase (CAO) gene having a 5 ' mRNA extension encoding a Nab1 translational repressor binding site in a CAO knockout line it was possible to continuously alter chlorophyll b levels and correspondingly light-harvesting antenna sizes by light-activated Nab1 repression of CAO expression as a function of growth light intensity. Significantly, algae having light-regulated antenna sizes had substantially higher photosynthetic rates and two-fold greater biomass productivity than the parental wild-type strains as well as near wild-type ability to carry out state transitions and non-photochemical quenching. These results have broad implications for enhanced algae and plant biomass productivity.
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