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Triton X-100 as an effective surfactant for the isolation and purification of photosystem I from Arthrospira platensis

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Abstract

Surfactants play important roles in the preparation, structural, and functional research of membrane proteins, and solubilizing and isolating membrane protein, while keeping their structural integrity and activity intact is complicated. The commercial n-Dodecyl-β-D-maltoside (DDM) and Triton X-100 (TX) were used as solubilizers to extract and purify trimeric photosystem I (PSI) complex, an important photosynthetic membrane protein complex attracting broad interests. With an optimized procedure, TX can be used as an effective surfactant to isolate and purify PSI, as a replace of the much more expensive DDM. A mechanism was proposed to interpret the solubilization process at surfactant concentrations lower than the critical solubilization concentration. PSI-TX and PSI-DDM had identical polypeptide bands, pigment compositions, oxygen consumption, and photocurrent activities. This provides an alternative procedure and paves a way for economical and large-scale trimeric PSI preparation.

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Abbreviations

PSI:

Photosystem I

DDM:

n-Dodecyl-β-D-maltoside

TX:

Triton X-100

CD:

Circular dichroism

CMC:

Critical micelle concentration

CSC:

Critical solubilization concentration

Chl:

Chlorophyll

Phe:

Pheophytin

PSI-DDM:

PSI isolated and purified by DDM

PSI-TX:

PSI isolated and purified by TX

PSI-DSSC:

PSI-sensitized solar cell

HPLC:

High performance liquid chromatography

SDS-PAGE:

Sodium dodecyl sulfate polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis

A. platensis :

Arthrospira platensis (old name: Spirulina platensis)

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Acknowledgments

The authors thank Prof. Barry D. Bruce for comments and discussions. The authors appreciate the financial support by the Shandong Provincial Natural Science Foundation (ZR2010BL008), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (21033005, 21073236, 31100263), and the program for New Century Excellent Talents in University of Ministry of Education of China (NCET-10-0815), the Natural Science Foundation for Distinguished Young Scholar of Shandong Province (JQ201008), and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. State Key Laboratory of Heavy Oil Processing, Center for Bioengineering and Biotechnology, China University of Petroleum (East China), Qingdao, 266580, China

    Daoyong Yu, Guihong Huang, Fengxi Xu, Mengfei Wang, Shuang Liu & Fang Huang

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  1. Daoyong Yu
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Correspondence to Daoyong Yu or Fang Huang.

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Yu, D., Huang, G., Xu, F. et al. Triton X-100 as an effective surfactant for the isolation and purification of photosystem I from Arthrospira platensis . Photosynth Res 120, 311–321 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11120-014-9988-5

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