Abstract
A green alga Chlamydomonas reinhardtii has a comparable light-harvesting machineries to vascular plants including chlorophyll a/b-binding outer antennae which is composed of the major and minor complexes, and chlorophyll a-binding core antennae. However, it shows very high growth rates under high light conditions (2000μE/m2/s ), where most of vascular plants can not survive. This is probably due to the effective NPQ induction observed in the high-light acclimated cells since the levels of photoinhibition and NPQ are well correlated with the growth light intensities.In this study, we study the mechanism for the high NPQ induction in the high-light acclimated C. reinhardtii. Physiological properties of the wild-type algal cells grown under high light conditions were firstly examined. The outer antenna fractions were then isolated and biochemically characterized. The obtained results will be discussed in relation to the algal NPQ mechanism and the structure of the high-light acclimated LHCII.
