Unravelling the light controlling switch in Cyanobacteria

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Carbon dioxide levels are increasing rapidly causing global warming. Despite the current efforts in place, scientists predict carbon dioxide levels will continue to rise and innovative methods to sequester carbon are needed. Approximately 2 billion years ago, microorganisms called cyanobacteria removed carbon dioxide from the atmosphere causing the great oxygen event that enabled life as we know it to be created. Can cyanobacteria again solve the crisis we are seeing today?Cyanobacteria capture a broad spectrum of light during photosynthesis enabling them to sequester carbon more effectively compared with plants or trees. Yet, energy transfer during photosynthesis does not occur effectively all the time. By applying an innovative, state-of-the-art analytical approach, we have for the first time identified a mechanism within cyanobacteria's light-harvesting machinery that the organism uses to limit energy transfer during photosynthesis, thus rendering photosynthesis inefficient. Using an inter-disciplinary team of molecular biologists, structural biologists, analytical chemists and experts in photophysics, this proposal seeks to determine the precise role of this newly found molecular switch within cyanobacteria and use this knowledge to engineer cyanobacteria with enhanced photosynthetic properties for use by the renewable energy industries to enhance carbon sequestration.