PARENT SESSION
Plenary Lectures 3
Wednesday September 1st, 2004 8:30 AM Room 210A

Photosynthetic light-harvesting: how the energy flows. Rienk van Grondelle^*,1, ¹ Department of Physics and Astronomy, Faculty of Sciences, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

ABSTRACT- The efficient harvesting of solar photons is at the basis of the success of photosynthesis. Now that the structure of several light-harvesting systems is known we can try to understand their architecture in terms of their function. In this lecture I will illustrate how energy flows through such a system of connected pigments to be finally trapped by the reaction center and I will compare the amazing symmetric bacterial antenna with the chaotic antennas of photosystem 1 and 2. I will try to answer what the design principle of the antenna may have been. A carefully organized set of pigments, each with its own specific excitation energy with the fastest trapping time possible? Or just a bag of chlorophylls? Maybe the losses were minimized ? Maybe a particular spectral position or spectral range had to be "engineered"? Or maybe "rowing with the available oars"? Maybe just "beauty"?

KEY WORDS: antenna