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An improved equation and assay for determining the CO(2)/O(2) specificity for Rubisco
Guofu Li1, Haibin Mao, Xiang Ruan
1State Key Laboratory of Biomembrane and Membrane Biotechnology, Department of Biological Sciences and Biotechnology, Tsinghua University, Beijing, 100084, P. R, China, dbsznm@mail.tsinghua.edu.cn.
Abstract:
The determination of the CO(2)/O(2) specificity factor (Omega) is very important to investigate the Rubisco carbon assimilation efficiency. In this paper, it is proved that previous formulae can introduce notable errors into calculating the CO(2)/O(2) specificity factor (Omega) because CO(2) and O(2) are both the substrates and the mutually competitive inhibitors for Rubisco. A simple integrated equation is proposed to calculate the CO(2)/O(2) specificity factor (Omega). On the other hand, previous multi-step procedures, including the manipulation of radioisotope ((14)C and/or (3)H) and the chromatographic separation of the products, are inconvenient and may cause much random error. An improved assay procedure is presented therefore, which includes the spectrophotometric measurement of 3-phosphoglycerate-dependent NADH oxidation with a coupled enzyme system.
