Size-Dependent Optical Properties of Grana Inside Chloroplast of Plant Cells

Well-packed thylakoids known as grana are one of the major functional sites for photosynthesis in algae and plants. Their highly ordered structures can be considered as a few hundred nanometer-sized particles having distinct scattering cross sections from other various macromolecular organizations inside plant cells. With this background we show that elastic light scattering imaging and microspectroscopy is an important tool for investigating structure and organization of grana inside a single chloroplast in plant cells. We have demonstrated this noninvasive method to identify the distribution of grana in intact fresh leaf of robust and rapidly growing Egaria densa, which is also known as Anachris and among the most popular aquarium plants. The scattering efficiency spectra of their individual grana fairly resemble cooperative absorption spectra of porphyrins and carotenoids. We found that the electronic structure of the stacked thylakoids shows granum size-dependence, indicating that size of grana is one of the critical parameters in the regulation of the photochemical functions in the thylakoid.