Structural, Mechanistic and Genomic Insights into OCP- Mediated Photoprotection - Advances in Botanical Research - page 22

very low and a recovery of fluorescence and of the size of the antenna will
be observed.
8. OUTSTANDING QUESTIONS AND FUTURE
PROSPECTS
The OCP was first described more than 30 years ago, but in less than
a decade after the structure determination of the OCP, a protein with an
unknown function, an entire field of OCP-related research has been estab-
lished. New data from structural, genomic and functional studies are ever
more rapidly expanding our understanding of the OCP-mediated photo-
protection in cyanobacteria. Key questions that remain to be elucidated
include the following:
What are the specific amino acids of the OCP that interact with the
phycobilisome?
Does the OCP consist of a receiver and output domain like other blue-
light photoreceptors?
What is the structure of the OCP r?
What is the structure of the RCP?
What is the function of the paralogues of the N- and C-terminal
domains of the OCP?
How do organisms that lack an FRP recover from NPQ?
How does FRP interact with the OCP and with the phycobilisome?
We anticipate that with the continued rapid accumulation of structural,
function and genomic data, these questions will be answered very soon,
setting the stage for the tuning of photoprotection in biotechnologically
important cyanobacterial systems as well as for developing OCP system for
optogenetic applications in synthetic biology.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The work conducted by the U.S. Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute is sup-
ported by the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy Under Contract No.
DE-AC02 05CH11231. C.A.K. was also supported by National Science Foundation grant
MCB0851070.
The work conducted in CEA Saclay, France is supported by by grants from the Agence
Nationale de la Recherche (ANR, project CYANOPROTECT), the Centre National de
la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), the Commissariat à l'Energie Atomique (CEA) and
HARVEST EU FP7 Marie Curie Research.
REFERENCES
Adir, N. (2005). Elucidation of the molecular structures of components of the phycobili-
some: reconstructing a giant. Photosynthesis Research , 85 (1), 15-32.