Publications by authors named "Y Tsukatani"

Article Synopsis
  • Anoxygenic photosynthesis includes two types: type-I and type-II reaction centers, with type-I using both bacteriochlorophyll and chlorophyll, while type-II relies solely on bacteriochlorophyll.
  • Researchers aimed to modify the type-II bacterium Rhodovulum sulfidophilum to produce chlorophyll a by introducing the enzyme chlorophyll synthase, but no accumulation was observed due to a lack of necessary proteins.
  • By also incorporating genes for the type-I reaction center and components needed for its assembly, the team successfully yielded detectable amounts of chlorophyll a, indicating that type-I systems help in chlorophyll a accumulation and may require specific lipids for function.
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Article Synopsis
  • The study explores how life utilizing light energy changed Earth's biology and carbon dynamics, highlighting the importance of photosynthesis in shaping today's biosphere.
  • It uses a comprehensive phylogenetic analysis of over 10,000 bacterial genomes to identify the evolutionary connections between bacteria, light metabolism, and carbon fixation.
  • The findings reveal that all current light-metabolizing organisms trace back to a common ancestor, an ancient non-oxygen-producing phototroph, and outline the evolution of light metabolism leading to the rise of oxygen-generating organisms and Cyanobacteria.
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In the biosynthetic pathway of bacteriochlorophyll(BChl)-a/b/c/d/e molecules, BchF and BchV enzymes catalyze the hydration of a C3-vinyl to C3-1-hydroxyethyl group. In this study, the in vitro reactions catalyzed by BchF and BchV partially afforded a C3-epimeric mixture of the hydrated products (secondary alcohols), with the primary recovery of the C3-vinylated substrate. The stereoselectivity and substrate specificity for the in vitro reverse enzymatic dehydration were examined using zinc chlorophyll analogs as model substrates by BchF and BchV, which were obtained from extracts of Escherichia coli overexpressing the respective genes from Chlorobaculum tepidum and used without further purification.

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is a filamentous anoxygenic phototrophic bacterium that grows chemotrophically under oxic conditions and phototrophically under anoxic conditions. Because photosynthesis-related genes are scattered without any gene clusters in the genome, it is still unclear how this bacterium regulates protein expression in response to environmental changes. In this study, we performed a proteomic time-course analysis of how expresses proteins to acclimate to environmental changes, namely the transition from chemoheterotrophic respiratory to photoheterotrophic growth mode.

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Geranylgeranyl reductase (GGR) encoded by the bchP gene catalyzes the reductions of three unsaturated C = C double bonds (C6 = C7, C10 = C11, and C14 = C15) in a geranylgeranyl (GG) group of the esterifying moiety in 17-propionate residue of bacteriochlorophyll (BChl) molecules. It was recently reported that GGR in Halorhodospira halochloris potentially catalyzes two hydrogenations, yielding BChl with a tetrahydrogeranylgeranyl (THGG) tail. Furthermore, its engineered GGR, in which N-terminal insertion peptides characteristic for H.

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