Unravelling the light controlling switch in Cyanobacteria

二氧化碳含量迅速增加，导致全球变暖。尽管目前的努力已经到位，但科学家预测二氧化碳水平将继续上升，需要创新的方法来封存碳。大约20亿年前，被称为蓝藻的微生物从大气中去除二氧化碳，导致了伟大的氧气事件，使我们所知的生命得以创造。蓝藻能再次解决我们今天看到的危机吗？蓝细菌在光合作用过程中捕获广泛的光，使它们能够比植物或树木更有效地固碳。然而，光合作用过程中的能量转移并不总是有效地发生。通过应用一种创新的、最先进的分析方法，我们首次确定了蓝细菌捕光机制中的一种机制，该机制用于限制光合作用过程中的能量转移，从而使光合作用效率低下。利用分子生物学家，结构生物学家，分析化学家和生物物理学专家组成的跨学科团队，该提案旨在确定这种新发现的分子开关在蓝藻中的确切作用，并利用这些知识设计具有增强光合作用特性的蓝藻，供可再生能源行业使用，以增强碳封存。

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.