Ignacio Casuso

(collaborator. James Sturgis, Laboratoire d’Ingénierie des Systèmes Macromoléculaires, Marseille France)

The lateral organization of bacterial photosynthetic membranes is particularly important for their function because (i) the light transfer from light harvesting proteins to the reaction center depends on protein organization [1], and (ii) regulates the diffusion of quinone from the reaction center to the cytochrome bc1 complex.

Thanks to AFM we visualize and analyze the protein organization and function of bacterial photosynthetic membranes, this information is next combined with an optical spectroscopy photosynthetic energy flow assay to correlate funtion with the photosynthetic membrane supramolecular organisation. Moreover, the use of nanoscale engineering of the supramolecular organisation architecture entails a better comprehension of the photosynthetic membrane functioning.

Reference

[1] ‘Organization and Assembly of Light-Harvesting Complexes in the Purple Bacterial Membrane’ James N. Sturgis, Robert A. Niederman 2009 The Purple Phototrophic Bacteria pp 253-273