The Magnesium Branch of the Tetrapyrrole Biosynthetic Pathway

It should be noted that the focus of the research changed somewhat during the course of the current award. The initial focus is indicated by the title of the current grant, ''The Magnesium Branch of the Chlorophyll Biosynthetic Pathway''. During the current grant period, Dr. Robert Willows, a postdoctoral associate, joined the faculty of McQuarie University in Australia. When he left my lab, we decided that he should independently pursue research on structure/function relationships in Mg chelatase and that our laboratories would collaborate on regulatory studies of this enzyme. Also, during the current award period, I began collaborating with Dr. Ariane Atteia and Mr. Robert van Lis, who were at the time located at the Autonomous University of Mexico. Dr. Atteia has since joined my laboratory and Mr. van Lis will also do so when he obtains his Ph.D. in the near future. These individuals bring to the laboratory their interests and expertise in the respiratory components of Chlamydomonas and their desire to become experts in tetrapyrrole metabolism. Recently, in a collaboration with Dr. David Bollivar, a former postdoctoral associate who is now at Illinois Wesleyan University, and Dr. Caroline Walker, who was at Clemson University but has since left this research area, we recently made a major breakthrough on the oxygen-independent cyclase reaction, which has now become an important component of the current proposal. Finally, our research on phycobilin biosynthesis in Synechucystis has revealed that this organism can grow at very low oxygen concentrations and its genome contains several genes that may encode for enzymes that catalyze alternative oxygen-independent reactions for tetrapyrrole biosynthesis, so characterizing the genes, their enzymes, and regulation of expression have also become parts of the current proposal