Nicoletta Liguori (ICFO) — Understanding Light-Harvesting Regulation in Photosynthetic Organisms with Molecular Dynamics Simulations

💡 A new RES Success Story about plants reaction to light changes 💡

📋 "Understanding Light-Harvesting Regulation in Photosynthetic Organisms with Molecular Dynamics Simulations” led by Nicoletta Liguori from ICFO

Plants are constantly exposed to sunlight with rapidly changing intensities, requiring them to quickly switch photoprotection on and off to prevent damage and accelerating this process potentially encapsulates the key to improve biomass production. 

Light-harvesting complexes (LHCs) are responsible for both photosynthesis, harvesting and transporting solar energy when light intensity is low, and photoprotection, dissipating excess energy as heat when light intensity is high. This switch is regulated by pH changes and interactions with proteins and cofactors. 

Particularly, green algae trigger photoprotection using a stress-related LHC family protein which is similar to LHCs in plants, but able to sense pH changes independently of other proteins and cofactors. 

🖥 Thanks to RES supercomputer #Turgalium from CIEMAT, the team equilibrated simulation boxes of photosynthetic membranes containing both algal and plant LHCs up to the millisecond timescale. They used atomistic molecular dynamics simulations explicitly accounting for pH to model photoprotection activation.

With the simulated data, the team is now studying the differences between algal and plant mechanisms and figuring how to mimic the algal activation mechanism in plants. This algal light-harvesting regulation knowledge will potentially lead to applications increasing crop biomass yields in the future. 

📸 The image below shows an atomistic molecular dynamics simulation of the photoprotection trigger in green algae stress-related LHCs that is embedded in a photosynthetic membrane and solvated with water. 

Created by Gregor Hill from ICFO.