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Algae and Cyanobacteria in Extreme Environments pp 79–97Cite as

Marine Phototrophs in the Twilight Zone

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Part of the book series: Cellular Origin, Life in Extreme Habitats and Astrobiology ((COLE,volume 11))

Phototrophs (photolithoautotrophs) are organisms that use light as their energy source to synthesize organic compounds. These organisms include some bacteria, cyanobacteria, algae, and plants. They harvest light by various pigments, the main of these being chlorophylls, and its energy is transferred to the photosynthetic reaction centers. Even though phototrophs depend on light for their survival, some of these grow under very low light.

In general, the terrestrial light flux, even under the most intense sunlight is too low for single chlorophyll molecules to sustain photosynthesis, since the arrival of photons would be so slow that the S states (Kok et al., 1970, Falkowski and Raven, 1997) would decay spontaneously, not allowing generation of oxygen or carbon reduction. In reality, light is harvested in the photosynthetic apparatus by “antennae,” consisting of hundreds of pigment molecules embedded in the thylakoids or similar membranes. The antennae have a far larger cross section,σ, or probability of intercepting a photon than single pigment molecules. The energy intercepted by the antennae migrates as excitation energy to the few chlorophyll molecules in the photosynthetic reaction centers.

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  1. The Mina & Everard Goodman Faculty of Life Sciences, Bar-Ilan University, 52900, Ramat-Gan, Israel

    Noga Stambler Ph.D & Zvy Dubinsky Ph.D

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  1. Noga Stambler Ph.D
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  1. The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Mevo Hadas 20, 1132, 90435, Efrat, Israel

    Joseph Seckbach Ph.D

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Stambler, N., Dubinsky, Z. (2007). Marine Phototrophs in the Twilight Zone. In: Seckbach, J. (eds) Algae and Cyanobacteria in Extreme Environments. Cellular Origin, Life in Extreme Habitats and Astrobiology, vol 11. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-6112-7_5

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