Identifying the Subcellular Localization of Poorly Characterized Proteins Required for Photosynthesis

Abstract

Photosynthesis is essential to all living beings on Earth, providing most of the food, energy, and material. Developing a deeper understanding of photosynthesis would give us tools to improve plant yield, which has become an urging desire due to the soaring food demands from a rapidly expanding population. Despite the importance of photosynthesis, many underlying mechanisms and proteins remained enigmatic. In order to advance our understandings, we utilize a fluorescent protein tagging pipeline and a gene rescue approach in the model alga Chlamydomonas reinhardtii to determine the localization and function of a group of poorly characterized phototrophic growth-related genes. Our data reveal the subcellular localization of 14 proteins and demonstrate 8 genes’ involvement in photosynthesis, shedding light on these once obscured genes and pathways and contributing to new opportunities for engineering photosynthesis that were previously unavailable.