Photosynthetic proteins in action! Towards a real-time investigation of how light-harvesting is regulated in plants
Nicoletta Liguori (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam)
ABSTRACT:
Plants provide a natural example of how solar energy can be converted into chemical energy in the presence of oxygen, while avoiding photooxidation. Nowadays, it has been established that plants avoid photooxidation by activating a rapidly inducible and reversible photoprotective mechanism at the level of their light-harvesting complexes. However, it is still unknown how this photoprotective mechanism is activated.
In this lecture the audience will be introduced to the current knowledge on: i) how light-harvesting is regulated in plants and more in general in oxygenic photosynthetic organisms, and ii) which experimental and computational tools are being developed, in particular by this group, to determine at the molecular level how plants switch photoprotection on.
Understanding how and how quickly plants can activate/deactivate photoprotection will provide the answer to a longstanding open question in the field of biophysics and physical chemistry. Such knowledge will also be key to stimulate new studies aimed at maximizing plant productivity through the optimization of photoprotective responses, a recent groundbreaking line of research (Kromdijk et al Science 2016).
RECOMMENDED PAPERS:
Liguori, N., Campos, S. R., Baptista, A. M., & Croce, R. (2019). Molecular anatomy of plant photoprotective switches: the sensitivity of PsbS to the environment, residue by residue. The journal of physical chemistry letters, 10(8), 1737-1742.
Liguori, N., Xu, P., Van Stokkum, I. H., Van Oort, B., Lu, Y., Karcher, D., … & Croce, R. (2017). Different carotenoid conformations have distinct functions in light-harvesting regulation in plants. Nature communications, 8(1), 1-9.
Liguori, N., Roy, L. M., Opacic, M., Durand, G., & Croce, R. (2013). Regulation of light harvesting in the green alga Chlamydomonas reinhardtii: the C-terminus of LHCSR is the knob of a dimmer switch. Journal of the American Chemical Society, 135(49), 18339-18342.
BIO:
Dr Nicoletta Liguori is currently a postdoctoral research associate in the LaserLab of the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (NL). Nicoletta is a physicist with experimental and computational experience in (bio)molecular physics. She graduated cum laude in Physics at the Università degli Studi Roma Tre (IT), after completing a master thesis in molecular dynamics (MD) simulations in the group of Teresa Head-Gordon at UC Berkeley (US). For her PhD, she joined the group of Biophysics of Photosynthesis headed by Roberta Croce at the VU Amsterdam (NL). In her PhD project, Nicoletta combined several spectroscopic approaches, especially ultrafast spectroscopy, with MD simulations to investigate how the light-harvesting complexes of plants and algae turn photoprotective mechanisms on. She obtained in 2018 a prestigious national NWO VENI grant that allowed her to establish her independent research line in the LaserLab of the VU Amsterdam. Nicoletta’s current focus is on developing methods to study the functional response of photoactive (bio)molecules to changes in pH. To this end, Nicoletta has developed a novel ultrafast multipulse spectroscopic tool that she is now combining with a mix of state-of-the-art computational methods.