BookJohn Golbeck, Art van der Est, editors.
Summary: "The volume is intended as an introduction to the physical principles governing the main processes that occur in photosynthesis, with emphasis on the light reactions and electron transport chain. A unique feature of the photosynthetic apparatus is the fact that the molecular structures are known in detail for essentially all of its major components. The availability of this data has allowed their functions to be probed at a very fundamental level to discover the design principles that have guided evolution. Other volumes on photosynthesis have tended to focus on single components or on a specific set of biophysical techniques, and the authors' goal is to provide new researchers with an introduction to the overall field of photosynthesis. The book is divided into sections, each dealing with one of the main physical processes in photosynthetic energy conversion. Each section has several chapters each describing the role that a basic physical property, such as charge or spin, plays in governing the process being discussed. The chapters proceed in an orderly fashion from a quantum mechanical description of early processes on an ultrafast timescale to a classical treatment of electron transfer and catalysis on a biochemical timescale culminating in evolutionary principles on a geological timescale."--Publisher's website.
Contents:
Part I. Light Energy Capture and Energy Transfer
1. Structure-Based Calculation of Pigment-Protein and Excitonic Pigment-Pigment Coupling in Photosynthetic Light-Harvesting Complexes / Frank Müh and Thomas Renger
2. Electron-Phonon and Exciton-Phonon Coupling in Light Harvesting, Insights from Line-Narrowing Spectroscopies / Jörg Pieper and Arvi Freiberg
3. Photosynthetic Energy Transfer and Charge Separation in Higher Plants / Tjaart P.J. Krüger, Vladimir I. Novoderezhkin, Elisabet Romero, and Rienk van Grondelle
Part II. Underlying Principles of Electron Transport
4. Tunneling in Electron Transport / Christopher C. Moser
5. Spin in Photosynthetic Electron Transport / Isaac F. Céspedes-Camacho and Jörg Matysik
6. Energy Changes in Photosynthetic Electron Transport: Probing Photosynthesis by Pulsed Photoacoustics / David Mauzerall and Steven P. Mielke
Part III. Separation and Stabilization of Charge
7. Mechanism of Primary Charge Separation in Photosynthetic Reaction Centers / Sergei Savikhin and Ryszard Jankowiak
8. Effects of Quasi-Equilibrium States on the Kinetics of Electron Transfer and Radical Pair Stabilisation in Photosystem I / Stefano Santabarbara, Robert Jennings, and Giuseppe Zucchelli
9. Energetics of Cofactors in Photosynthetic Complexes: Relationship Between Protein-Cofactor Interactions and Midpoint Potentials / James P. Allen and JoAnn C. Williams
Part IV. Donor Side Intermediates and Water Splitting
10. The Radical Intermediates of Photosystem II / K.V. Lakshmi, Christopher S. Coates, Stuart Smith, and Ruchira Chatterjee
11. Structure-Function Relationships in the Mn₄CaO₅ Water-Splitting Cluster / Jian-Ren Shen
12. Water and Oxygen Diffusion Pathways Within Photosystem II. Computational Studies of Controlled Substrate Access and Product Release / Serguei Vassiliev and Doug Bruce
Part V. Evolution of the Photosynthetic Apparatus
13. From Ionizing Radiation to Photosynthesis / Alexander N. Melkozernov
14. Origin of Oxygenic Photosynthesis from Anoxygenic Type I and Type II Reaction Centers / John F. Allen.