An integrated approach towards extracting structural characteristics of chlorosomes from a mutant of .

Chlorosomes, the photosynthetic antenna complexes of green sulfur bacteria, are paradigms for light-harvesting elements in artificial designs, owing to their efficient energy transfer without protein participation. We combined magic angle spinning (MAS) NMR, optical spectroscopy and cryogenic electron microscopy (cryo-EM) to characterize the structure of chlorosomes from a mutant of . The chlorosomes of this mutant have a more uniform composition of bacteriochlorophyll (BChl) with a predominant homolog, [8Ethyl, 12Ethyl] BChl , compared to the wild type (WT).

A set-up to study photochemically induced dynamic nuclear polarization in photosynthetic reaction centres by solid-state NMR.

Recently, solid-state NMR spectroscopy became a viable method to investigate photosynthetic reaction centres (RCs) on the atomic level. To study the electronic structure of the radical cation state of the RC, occurring after the electron emission, solid-state NMR using an illumination set-up can be exploited. This paper describes the illumination set-up we designed for a standard Bruker wide-bore MAS NMR probe.