An alternative carotenoid-to-bacteriochlorophyll energy transfer pathway in photosynthetic light harvesting.

ABSTRACT: Blue and green sunlight become available for photosynthetic energy conversion through the light-harvesting (LH) function of carotenoids, which involves transfer of carotenoid singlet excited states to nearby (bacterio)chlorophylls (BChls). The excited-state manifold of carotenoids usually is described in terms of two singlet states, S(1) and S(2), of which only the latter can be populated from the ground state by the absorption of one photon. Both states are capable of energy transfer to (B)Chl. We recently showed that in the LH1 complex of the purple bacterium Rhodospirillum rubrum, which is rather inefficient in carotenoid-to-BChl energy transfer, a third additional carotenoid excited singlet state is formed. This state, which we termed S*, was found to be a precursor on an ultrafast fis

SUBMITTER: Papagiannakis E 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC122894 | biostudies-literature | 2002 Apr

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature