Abstract
Photosynthetic bacteria such as Rhodobacter sphaeroides and Rb.capsulatus are capable of chemoheterotrophic growth in the dark, and under conditions where oxygen is not limiting can repress the synthesis of the photosynthetic apparatus almost completely. The removal of oxygen initiates the coordinated synthesis of the pigments, proteins and lipids of the photosynthetic membrane which grows as invaginations of the cytoplasmic membrane (Niederman et al., 1976; Chory et al., 1984). By the time this process is complete, light harvesting (LH) domains of several thousand bacteriochlorophyll (bchl) and carotenoid (crt) molecules have been assembled, consisting of LH2 units which surround and interconnect cores containing LH1 and the photochemical reaction centre (Hunter et al., 1985. Vos et al., 1988). Nevertheless, such cells still contain small amounts of non-pigmented cytoplasmic membrane (Parks and Niederman, 1978) and membrane regions enriched in newly synthesised pigment protein complexes. (Niederman et al., 1979)
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Coomber, S.A., Chaudri, M., Hunter, C.N. (1990). The Cloning and Organisation of Genes for Bacteriochlorophyll and Carotenoid Biosynthesis in Rhodobacter Sphaeroides . In: Drews, G., Dawes, E.A. (eds) Molecular Biology of Membrane-Bound Complexes in Phototrophic Bacteria. FEMS Symposium. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4757-0893-6_8
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