Investigating the Energy Transfer Dynamics in the Baseplate of Green Photosynthetic Bacteria using 2D Electronic Spectroscopy

The structure of the baseplate, a pigment-protein complex that mediates energy transfer in green photosynthetic bacteria, is not fully understood. The baseplate cannot be isolated from the chlorosome light harvesting antenna, but their spectral signatures can be separated with femtosecond two-dimensional electronic spectroscopy (2DES)[1]. In this work, 2D spectra of the baseplate in a mutant of Chlorobaculum tepidum, which was previously found to contain dimeric pigments[2], will be compared to 2D spectra of Chloroflexus aurantiacus to characterize the pigment interactions and energy transfer pathways in both samples.

References
[1] J. Dostál et al., J. Phys. Chem. Lett. 2014, 5, 10, 1743-1747.
[2] J. T. Nielsen et al., Nat. Commun. 2016, 7, 12454.