In vitro Assembly of
R-phycoerythrin from Marine Red Alga Polysiphonia urceolata
ZHANG Yu-Zhong1,2*, CHEN
Xiu-Lan1, WANG Lu-Shan1, ZHOU Bai-Cheng2, HE
Jin-An3, SHI Dong-Xia4, PANG Shi-Jin4
( 1State Key Laboratory of Microbial Technology, Shandong
University, Jinan 250100, China; 2Institute of
Oceanology, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Qingdao 266071, China；3Institute of Photographic
Chemistry, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100101, China; 4Beijing
Laboratory of Vacuum Physics, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100080,
China )
Abstract Scanning
tunneling microscope was used to investigate the in vitro assembly of
R-phycoerythrin (R-PE) from the marine red alga Polysiphonia urceolata.
The results showed that R-PE molecules assembled together by disc-to-disc while
absorbing on HOPG surface, which just looked like the rods in the
phycobilisomes. When the water-soluble R-PE was dissolved in 2% ethanol/water
spreading solution, they could form monolayer film at the air/water interface.
Similar disc-to-disc array of R-PE was constituted in the two-dimensional
Langmuir-Blodgett film by the external force. It could be concluded that, apart
from the key role of the linker polypeptides, the in vivo assembly of
phycobiliproteins into phycobilisomes is also dependent on the endogenous
properties of phycobiliprotein themselves.
Key words R-phycoerythrin；in vitro assembly；scanning tunneling microscopy
(STM)
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