Role of protein phosphorylation in the maintenance of photosystem two in plants

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The photosystem two (PSII) protein complex is widely considered to be one of the most remarkable molecular machines on Earth. PSII is found in plants, algae and cyanobacteria and performs the complex task of using sunlight to extract electrons from highly stable water molecules to allow oxygenic photosynthetic organisms to grow. At the same time PSII also produces the oxygen that we breathe. Unfortunately PSII is not a perfect machine; it sometimes breaks down, especially when the sunlight is very bright, and has to be repaired. Without this special repair mechanism PSII would be quickly inactivated in the light and plant growth and oxygen evolution would be inhibited. Despite the physiological importance of PSII repair, the details of the repair process are still unknown. A detailed understanding of PSII repair at the molecular level will provide us with important knowledge to help in the global effort to enhance photosynthesis in crop plants so that we can increase growth to help satisfy the ever increasing demand for more food and more biomass. In the case of land plants, we know that active PSII is located within the thylakoid membrane system of green chloroplasts found in leaves, but is segregated within the characteristic stacked regions of the membrane known as grana. For repair, the damaged PSII complex migrates outwards to the unstacked regions of the thylakoid system where the repair machinery is located. Here damaged PSII subunits can be degraded, newly synthesised subunits inserted and the PSII complex reactivated. How damaged PSII is specifically shuttled to the repair apparatus and how damaged subunits are specifically recognised for replacement is currently unknown. Over the years evidence has accumulated to suggest that the presence of negatively charged phosphate groups on four PSII core subunits might play a role in the repair process and in reshaping the membrane system in bright light to enhance repair. These previous studies have relied on the analysis of mutants that lack the kinase enzymes that phosphorylate PSII. However, it is now clear that these kinase mutants have effects outside PSII so it is still uncertain whether the specific lack of PSII phosphorylation is responsible for all the effects seen in the kinase mutants. In addition the kinase mutants block all PSII phosphorylation which has prevented analysis of the specific role of single subunit phosphorylation. In this application we propose to use a new approach to examine the role of protein phosphorylation in maintaining PSII activity in land plants. Rather than study kinase mutants, we will use chloroplast transformation technology to make tobacco plants that lack the amino-acid residue in each subunit that is normally phosphorylated. The kinase enzyme will still be active in these plants and so the effect of removing just one specific phosphate group from PSII can now be studied in isolation. In background work we have shown that this is a feasible strategy as we have already made tobacco plants unable to phosphorylate the D1 protein. Effects on the damage to PSII, its disassembly, its migration within the thylakoid membrane, the proteolytic degradation of damaged proteins, the reassembly of PSII and the impact on the structure of grana and plant growth under various illumination conditions will be performed use state-of-the-art approaches by a team of researchers with proven expertise in this area. We will study the maintenance of PSII in mutant plants lacking each of the four phosphorylation sites and also in engineered plants in which we remove increasing numbers of the phosphorylation sites to test for overlap of function. Overall our research will provide important new information on how the oxygen-evolving complex of photosynthesis is maintained in land plants and how the structure of the thylakoid membrane system is regulated.