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Updated: Mar 21, 2026

Purification of Active Photosystem I-Light Harvesting Complex I from Plant Tissues
Published on: February 3, 2023
Structure and energy transfer pathways of the plant photosystem I-LHCI supercomplex
Michihiro Suga1, Xiaochun Qin2, Tingyun Kuang3
1Research Institute for Interdisciplinary Science, Graduate School of Natural Science and Technology, Okayama University, Tsushima Naka 3-1-1, Okayama 700-8530, Japan.
Abstract:
Photosystem I (PSI) is one of the two photosystems in oxygenic photosynthesis, and absorbs light energy to generate reducing power for the reduction of NADP+ to NADPH with a quantum efficiency close to 100%. The plant PSI core forms a supercomplex with light-harvesting complex I (LHCI) with a total molecular weight of over 600kDa. Recent X-ray structure analysis of the PSI-LHCI membrane-protein supercomplex has revealed detailed arrangement of the light-harvesting pigments and other cofactors especially within LHCI. Here we introduce the overall structure of the PSI-LHCI supercomplex, and then focus on the excited energy transfer (EET) pathways from LHCI to the PSI core and photoprotection mechanisms based on the structure obtained.
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