Mapping the absorption landscape of far-red Photosystem II
Ho Fong Leong, Giovanni Consoli, Geoffry A Davis, Ben Hancox-Lachman, Kenta Renard, Fiazall Tufail, Lauren E Lee, Lucas Gautier, James W Murray, Andrea Fantuzzi, A William Rutherford · 2026
Read Mapping the absorption landscape of far-red Photosystem II by Ho Fong Leong, Giovanni Consoli, Geoffry A Davis, Ben Hancox-Lachman, Kenta Renard, Fiazall Tufail, Lauren E Lee, Lucas Gautier, James W Murray, Andrea Fantuzzi, A William Rutherford (2026) in the Tower of Babel, a free online library of public-domain works preserved in clean, searchable text. No sign-up. The full text is served as a plain-text file at a predictable URL, where text is present: https://antarctic-labs.com/tower-of-babel/pmc-13396731.txt.
Description
Leong and team map, in 2026, the absorption landscape of far-red Photosystem II, the machinery some cyanobacteria rebuild to harvest light beyond the visible range. In far-red mode, swapped subunits install chlorophylls, types f and d, that catch longer wavelengths. For the complex from Chroococcidiopsis thermalis and a Calothrix species, they combined cryo-electron microscopy, sequence checks, and charge analysis to assign each pigment its site and wavelength.
The C. thermalis structure revealed a subunit found only in far-red mode, PsbH2-prime, forming part of a chlorophyll f site, and the analyses assigned four chlorophyll f sites. Calothrix lacks the subunit and carries two of the four chlorophyll f sites found in its relative. Assigning wavelengths to red-shifted chlorophyll gives modelers the tools to simulate energy transfer through the far-red complex. The authors highlight shared features that let these microbes survive where white light barely reaches.
Catalog record
| CREATOR | Ho Fong Leong, Giovanni Consoli, Geoffry A Davis, Ben Hancox-Lachman, Kenta Renard, Fiazall Tufail, Lauren E Lee, Lucas Gautier, James W Murray, Andrea Fantuzzi, A William Rutherford |
|---|---|
| YEAR | 2026 |
| COLLECTION | PAPERS |
| FORMAT | TXT |
| FILE SIZE | 51 KB |
| VERSION | 1.0 |
| LICENSE | CC BY 4.0 |
| RIGHTS | CC BY |
| SOURCE | Europe PMC |