Related papers: On the Non-Oxygenic Origins of Thylakoids
How photosynthesis by Precambrian cyanobacteria oxygenated Earth's biosphere remains incompletely understood. Here it is argued that the oxic transition, which took place between approximately 2.3 and 0.5 Gyr ago, required a great…
The emergence of oxygenic photosynthesis created a new niche with dramatic potential to transform energy flow through Earth's biosphere. However, more primitive forms of photosynthesis that fix CO2 into biomass using electrons from reduced…
On the Earth, photosynthetic organisms are responsible for the production of virtually all of the oxygen in the atmosphere. On the land, vegetation reflects in the visible, leading to a red edge that developed about 450 Myr ago and has been…
Proteins in photosynthetic membranes can organize into patterned arrays that span the membrane's lateral size. Attractions between proteins in different layers of a membrane stack can play a key role in this ordering, as was suggested by…
The evolution of different forms of photosynthetic life has profoundly altered the activity level of the biosphere, radically reshaping the composition of Earth's oceans and atmosphere over time. However, the mechanistic impacts of a…
The most important thermodynamic work performed by life today is the dissipation of the solar photon flux into heat through organic pigments in water. From this thermodynamic perspective, biological evolution is thus just the dispersal of…
A chloroplast is a subcellular organelle of photosynthesis in plant and algal cells. A chloroplast genome encodes proteins of the photosynthetic electron transport chain and ribosomal proteins required to express them. Chloroplast-encoded…
Photosynthesis is an ancient metabolic process that began on the early Earth, offering plentiful energy to organisms that utilize it, to the extent that they can achieve global significance. The potential exists for similar processes to…
I describe the non-equilibrium thermodynamics and the photochemical mechanisms which may have been involved in the dissipative structuring, proliferation and evolution of the fundamental molecules at the origin of life from simpler and more…
As oxygen is essential for respiration and metabolism for multicellular organisms on Earth, its presence may be crucial for the development of a complex biosphere on other planets. And because life itself, through photosynthesis,…
One of the chief paradoxes of molecular oxygen (O$_2$) is that it is an essential requirement for multicellular eukaryotes on Earth while simultaneously posing a threat to their survival via the formation of reactive oxygen species. In this…
Planet Earth has evolved from an entirely anoxic planet with possibly a different tectonic regime to the oxygenated world with horizontal plate tectonics that we know today. For most of this time, Earth has been inhabited by a purely…
Observations have revealed evidence of photochemical processing in protoplanetary disks. This processing occurs in the photon dominated layer, the optically thin regions of the disk high above the disk midplane. It remains unclear, however,…
Competing geophysical/geochemical hypotheses for how Earth's surface became oxygenated - organic carbon burial, hydrogen escape to space, and changes in the redox state of volcanic gases - are examined and a more biologically-based…
Earth is expected to have acquired a reduced proto-atmosphere enriched in H2 and CH4 through the accretion of building blocks that contain metallic Fe and/or the gravitational trapping of surrounding nebula gas. Such an early, wet, reduced…
The universality of many pathways of core metabolism suggests a strong role for evolutionary selection, but it remains unclear whether existing pathways have been selected from a large or small set of biochemical possibilities. To address…
The size of the band gap and the energy position of the band edges make several oxynitride semiconductors promising candidates for efficient hydrogen and oxygen production under solar light illumination. The intense research efforts…
We investigate the abiotic production of oxygen and its photochemical byproduct ozone through water vapor photolysis in moist atmospheres of temperate terrestrial exoplanets. The amount of water vapor available for photolysis in the middle…
Oxygen is a promising exoplanet biosignature due to the evolutionary advantage conferred by harnessing starlight for photosynthesis, and the apparent low likelihood of maintaining oxygen-rich atmospheres without life. Hypothetical scenarios…
Photosystem II (PSII) and its associated light-harvesting complex II (LHCII) are highly concentrated in the stacked grana regions of photosynthetic thylakoid membranes. Within the membrane, PSII-LHCII supercomplexes can be arranged in…