Steady-state and time-resolved fluo- rescence spectroscopies have been used to study the excited state properties of Chl a in different ag- gregation forms of light-harvesting complex II (LHC II) from an intertidal green alga, Bryopsis corticulans, i.e. LHC II monomer, trimer and oligomer. When either Chl a or Chl b was selectively excited, the observed decrease in Chl a fluorescence in the oligomer is proved to be caused mainly by the fast fluorescence quenching among Chl a molecules, rather than by the decrease in Chl b-to-Chl a singlet excitation transfer efficiency. Analyses of the picosecond time-resolved fluorescence kinetics identified two exponential de- cay components in all of the three forms of LHC II: a longer-lived component (4.1―4.7 ns) originating from fluorescence emission of Chl a, and a shorter-lived one (135―540 ps) from the rapid equilibration of singlet excitation among Chl a molecules. The time constant of excitation equilibration is 135 ps in oli- gomer, 520 ps in trimer and 540 ps in monomer. These results imply that LHC II in oligomer form is inherently able to quench Chl a excitation, a mecha- nism which may be related to the photoprotection of PS II via changing the degree of LHC II aggregation in Bryopsis corticulans.
In this work steady-state absorption spectroscopy, circular dichroism spectroscopy and sub-micro-second time-resolved absorption spectroscopy were used to investigate the effect of pH on the struc-tures and functions of LH2 complex for Rhodopseudomonas palustris. The results revealed that: (1) B800 Bchla was gradually transformed to free pigments absorbing around 760 nm on the minutes timescale upon the induction of strong acidic pH, and subsequently there disappeared the CD signal for Qy band of B800 in the absence of B800. In addition, Carotenoids changed with the similar tendency to B850 BChl. (2) The introduction of strong basic pH gave rise to no significant changes for B800 Bchla, while B850 BChla experienced remarkable spectral blue-shift from 852 to 837 nm. Similar phe-nomenon was seen for the CD signal for Qy band of B850. Carotenoids displayed strong and pH-independent CD signals in the visible range. (3) In the case of both physiological and basic pH, broad and asymmetrical positive Tn←T1 transient absorption appeared following the pulsed photo-excitation of Car at 532 nm. By contrast, the featureless and weak positive signal was observed on the sub-microsecond timescale in the acidic pH environment. The aforementioned experimental results indicated that acidic pH-induced removal of B800 Bchla prevented the generation of the caro-tenoid triplet state (3Car*), which is known to be essential for the photo-protection function. Neverthe-less, carotenoids can still perform this important physiological role under the basic pH condition, where the spectral blue shift of B850 exerts little effect on the overall structure of the cyclic aggregate, therefore favoring the formation of carotenoid triplet state.
FENG Juan, LI XueFeng & LIU Yan School of Life Science and Technology, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu 610054, China
