Fluorescence blinking of the RC-LH1 complex from Rhodopseudomonas palustris

We investigate fluorescence blinking of individual RC-LH1 (reaction-centre-light-harvesting 1) complexes from the photosynthetic purple bacterium Rhodopseudomonas palustris. For both the on- and off-periods the telegraph-like intermittency of the fluorescence intensity follows power-law statistics with exponents between 1 and 2. Yet, this behaviour was only observed for a small fraction of the complexes studied. We argue that the majority of the complexes reside in a prolonged on-state, due to a mechanism that is similar to the Coulomb blockade in semiconductor quantum dots, and which results here from the photoinduced charges located within the RC upon photoexcitation of the LH1 antenna.