Chemistry Departmental Seminar — Dr. Helmut Kirchhoff

About the event

Title: From Molecules to Membranes: The Dynamic Architecture of Photosynthetic Membranes in Plants

Abstract: The protein machinery for biological conversion of sunlight into chemical energy is harbored in one of nature’s most sophisticated membrane system, the thylakoid membrane inside plant chloroplasts. It turns out that for a holistic understanding of photosynthetic energy conversion, a conceptual differentiation in three structural levels is beneficial: the entire membrane level (micrometer length scale), the mesoscopic level (~100 nm length scale), and the molecular level (~10 nm length scale). Furthermore, since plants are sessile organisms, they have to cope with environmental fluctuations (for example orders-of-magnitude changes in sunlight intensity) by alterations of the thylakoid membrane architecture on all three length scales. This talk will provide examples of our current research on structural thylakoid dynamics on the whole membrane, mesoscopic, and molecule level. The importance of these structural changes for the function of energy conversion will be highlighted.