Abstract
Cladosiphon okamuranus is an original strain of a brown alga in Okinawa and never found in the other place. Recently Iha et al. was successful to culture a discoidal form of the alga, which is a precursor of the alga body, and found that fucoxanthin contents was different in addition to the difference in the total weight when the light color differed during culture. Brown algae contain fucoxanthin-chlorophyll a/c proteins (FCP) as antenna complexes. FCP is a membrane protein with molecular weight of approximately 20000 and is spread over the oceanic photosynthetic prokaryote, although it has been isolated from only a few diatoms and brown algae and the 3-dimensional structure is not yet known. Thylakoid content is much higher in the discoidal form than that in the algae body, so there is an advantage of scale. We established the isolation and purification method of the FCP from the discoidal form.
