Imperial College London

Dr Tanai Cardona

Faculty of Natural SciencesDepartment of Life Sciences

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Contact

 

t.cardona Website

 
 
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Location

 

603Sir Ernst Chain BuildingSouth Kensington Campus

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Summary

 

Publications

Citation

BibTex format

@article{Cardona:2017:10.1101/109447,
author = {Cardona, T and Sánchez-Baracaldo, P and Rutherford, AW and Larkum, AWD},
doi = {10.1101/109447},
title = {Early Archean origin of Photosystem II},
url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1101/109447},
year = {2017}
}

RIS format (EndNote, RefMan)

TY  - JOUR
AB - <jats:title>Abstract</jats:title><jats:p>Photosystem II is a photochemical reaction center that catalyzes the light-driven oxidation of water to molecular oxygen. Water oxidation is the distinctive photochemical reaction that permitted the evolution of oxygenic photosynthesis and the eventual rise of Eukaryotes. At what point during the history of life an ancestral photosystem evolved the capacity to oxidize water still remains unknown. Here we study the evolution of the core reaction center proteins of Photosystem II using sequence and structural comparisons in combination with Bayesian relaxed molecular clocks. Our results indicate that a homodimeric photosystem with sufficient oxidizing power to split water had already appeared in the early Archean about a billion years before the most recent common ancestor of all described Cyanobacteria capable of oxygenic photosynthesis, and well before the diversification of some of the known groups of anoxygenic photosynthetic bacteria. Based on a structural and functional rationale we hypothesize that this early Archean photosystem was capable of water oxidation and had already evolved some level of protection against the formation of reactive oxygen species, which would place primordial forms of oxygenic photosynthesis at a very early stage in the evolutionary history of life.</jats:p>
AU - Cardona,T
AU - Sánchez-Baracaldo,P
AU - Rutherford,AW
AU - Larkum,AWD
DO - 10.1101/109447
PY - 2017///
TI - Early Archean origin of Photosystem II
UR - http://dx.doi.org/10.1101/109447
ER -