It is known that there are at least two redox-active Car (Tracewell and Brudvig 2003; Telfer et al. 2003), and five redox-active Chl (Tracewell and Brudvig 2008) in the secondary electron-transfer pathways of PSII. However, the sequence of electron-transfer events and the specific identity of Car and Chl cofactors in the pathway are unknown (Faller et al. 2001). The effect of perturbing CarD2 on the rates and yields Chl∙+ and Car∙+ formation will depend on the connectivity of CarD2 with the other redox cofactors in the secondary electron-transfer pathway. For example, if another redox cofactor were capable of donating an electron

to P 680 ∙+ on an appropriate timescale, then the selleck chemicals effect of perturbing CarD2 could be selleckchem negligible. However, in each of the mutated PSII samples (D2-G47W, D2-G47F, and D2-T50F), a substantial decrease in yield of the secondary donors is observed by near-IR spectroscopy (Fig. 4A). Therefore, CarD2 seems to act as a bottleneck, resulting in decreased yield of the Car∙ peak at 750 nm, the Chl∙+ peak from 800 to 840 nm, and the Car∙+ peak near 1,000 nm in all mutated PSII samples. Thus, there is no efficient alternative pathway for transferring

electrons to P 680 ∙+ . Similarly, as observed by EPR spectroscopy around the g = 2 region, the kinetics of formation for the secondary donor radicals are much slower in the G47F and G47W-mutated PSII samples than in the WT sample, although they are comparable to WT in the T50F-mutated PSII sample, which was modeled as having the smallest SC75741 perturbation to CarD2 (Fig. 9). The G47F and G47W-mutated PSII samples are less for efficient at forming a charge separation between Q A − and the secondary donors, indicating that CarD2 is involved in this process. The decreased yield and impaired kinetics of the mutated PSII samples indicate that CarD2 is an early intermediate in secondary electron transfer, consistent with CarD2 being the initial electron donor to P680 and the initial step in an extended “branched” secondary electron-transfer pathway. In addition to the decreased

overall radical yield, there is a specific perturbation of the near-IR spectrum in each mutated PSII sample: the maximum of the Car∙+ peak is shifted to slightly longer wavelengths (Fig. 4B), while the maxima of the Chl∙+ and Car∙ peaks remain unchanged. This indicates that the Car∙ is not generated from CarD2, but most likely from a Car with a nearby proton accepting amino acid residue, as previously proposed (Gao et al. 2009). Furthermore, when the Car∙+ peak is deconvoluted into two Gaussian components, each corresponding to a redox-active Car∙+ (Tracewell and Brudvig 2003), the shorter-wavelength component shifts significantly more than the longer-wavelength component (more than three times, see Table 1). In WT PSII, the shorter-wavelength component has a maximum at 980 nm and a FWHM of 37.9 nm, and is the dominant contribution to the Car∙+ peak at 20 K.