Project description:Chroococcidiopsis thermalis is an extremophilic cyanobacterium that is adaptable to a widerange of environments including deserts, where it can maintain viability after desiccation. This species is also capable of photoautotrophic growth under far-red light (FRL, 750 nm) The proteomic comparison in this study, in conjunction with topographical imaging of thylakoid membranes by atomic force microscopy, supports earlier findings that FRL growth is accompanied by the synthesis of alternative photosynthesis-related proteins. Under white light (WL), a number of phycobilisome (PBS) and photosystem (PS) subunits were predominant at levels 2 - 14-fold greater compared to FRL growth. Two antenna family proteins were markedly more abundant under WL, with a fold-difference of approximately 80. While WL-associated proteins persisted at relatively low abundance under FRL, an exclusive set of PBS and PS subunit isoforms was expressed under FRL. These proteins were undetectable under WL, in many cases encoded in a discrete FRL-associated gene cluster. In line with the expected higher energy capture rate under WL, complexes associated with electron transport (eg. cytochrome b6f) and the ATP synthase were 1.2 – 3.4 times more abundant than under FRL.
Project description:This experiment was designed to uncover the transcriptomic changes that would occur in rice after 24 h of supplemental FR treatment, in an accession dependant manner. To do so, 6 different varieties of rice (IR64, Nipponbare, Luk Takhar, M Blatec, Mudgo, Sabharaj and Zhenshan) were grown in the greenhouse facilities of the Botanical Gardens, Utrecht University, in The Netherlands, in summer and autumn of 2021. After five days in WL (400 µmol m-2 s-1 of combined sunlight and artificial light), the treatment group was exposed to supplemental FR (500 µmol m-2 s-1 FR, R:FR of 0.2) light for 24 hours. The whole shoot was sampled, with four plants pooled in one sample. The experiment was repeated four times, resulting in 48 samples (6 varieties x 2 treatments x 4 replicates). Same samples were run on two individual lanes.
