Welcome to the Niyogi lab!
Fighting climate change with photosynthesis
The lab’s long-term research goals are to understand how photosynthetic energy conversion works, how it is regulated, and how it might be improved to help meet the world’s needs for food, fuel, and carbon sequestration to fight climate change.
Current lab members use a wide array of experimental organisms and interdisciplinary approaches to (1) investigate fundamental questions about the regulation of photosynthesis, (2) elucidate molecular mechanisms underlying the operation of the oceanic biological carbon pump, and (3) apply this fundamental knowledge to increase photosynthetic efficiency and carbon sequestration by plants and algae.
We maintain a friendly and interactive lab that values scientific excellence, diversity, creativity, open access, and interdisciplinary collaboration.
News
- Congratulations to Niyogi lab tech cohort who will be moving on to grad school in the fall!Cailyn, Anna, and Raquel have accepted admissions offers to Ph.D. programs at UC San Diego, UW, and UC Berkeley. Congratulations!
- A hemoprotein with a zinc-mirror heme site ties heme availability to carbon metabolism in cyanobacteriaResearch Scientist Masakazu Iwai contributed to this Nature Communications paper on the Synechocystis Dri1 protein, which contains a domain related to iron (DRI, formerly DUF2470). This protein is a homolog of the PGR7/GBP protein that was first described by former Ph.D. student Hou-Sung Jung back in 2010.
- Structural diversity in eukaryotic photosynthetic light harvestingThis Annual Review of Plant Biology article by Research Scientist Masakazu Iwai and former graduate student Dhruv Patel-Tupper is now available online.
- Macroscale structural changes of thylakoid architecture during high light acclimation in Chlamydomonas reinhardtiiCongratulations to former lab undergrad and research technician Mimi Broderson on her Photosynthesis Research paper using imaging and membrane fractionation to investigate thylakoid unstacking in high light! The paper is part of a special issue dedicated to the memory of our dear colleague and friend, Ken Sauer.
- Congratulations, Thien, on receiving your Ph.D.!Congratulations to our graduate student Thien Crisanto for completing her Ph.D.! Her dissertation focused on understanding how and where the LHCX1 protein functions in NPQ in a model photosynthetic stramenopile, Nannochloropsis oceanica.
- Metabolomic, photoprotective, and photosynthetic acclimatory responses to post-flowering drought in sorghumFormer postdoc Chris Baker led this field study of drought-stressed sorghum at UC’s Kearney Agricultural Research and Extension Center in the Central Valley. It was a great team effort! Chris’ Plant Direct paper shows how photosynthesis and photoprotection respond in a drought-tolerant crop.
- Kinetics of the xanthophyll cycle and its role in the photoprotective memory and responsePh.D. student Thien Crisanto contributed to this Nature Communications paper by Audrey Short and Tom Fay that uses modeling of the xanthophyll cycle to predict the qE and qZ components of NPQ in Nannochloropsis oceanica. Check out the LBNL news story here!
- Time-resolved systems analysis of the induction of high photosynthetic capacity in Arabidopsis during acclimation to high lightFormer postdoc Chris Baker’s recent paper in New Phytologist provides new insights into how plants adjust Pmax during acclimation to high light – another way to deal with excess light is to use more of it in photosynthesis!
- Chlorophyll to zeaxanthin energy transfer in non-photochemical quenching: an exciton annihilation-free transient absorption studyThrough our longstanding interdisciplinary collaboration with Graham Fleming’s lab in the Department of Chemistry, we used a new annihilation-free transient absorption approach with thylakoids from N. benthamiana CRISPR mutants to show that excitation energy transfer (EET) quenching by zeaxanthin is indeed associated with qE. Preprint is available on bioRxiv.
- Congratulations, Dhruv, on receiving a prestigious AAAS Science & Technology Policy Fellowship!Former graduate student Dhruv Patel-Tupper is now working at the Foreign Ag Service of the USDA to advance international trade policy at the intersection of agriculture and climate change.