The most prominent role of peroxisomes in photosynthetic plant tissues is their participation in photorespiration, a process also known as the oxidative C2 cycle or the oxidative photosynthetic carbon cycle. Photorespiration is an essential process in land plants, as evident from the conditionally lethal phenotype of mutants deficient in enzymes or transport proteins involved in this pathway. T...

The possible role of photorespiration as a general stress protection mechanism, and in C(4) plant metabolism, is controversial. In particular, the potential involvement of photorespiration in the acquisition of desiccation tolerance in 'resurrection' plants is unknown. An investigation was carried out into whether photorespiration is present in leaves of the C(4) resurrection plant Sporobolus s...

To study how conserved fundamental concepts of the heat stress response (HSR) are in photosynthetic eukaryotes, we applied pharmaceutical and antisense/amiRNA approaches to the unicellular green alga Chlamydomonas reinhardtii. The Chlamydomonas HSR appears to be triggered by the accumulation of unfolded proteins, as it was induced at ambient temperatures by feeding cells with the arginine analo...

Using a mass-spectrometric (16)O(2)/(18)O(2)-isotope technique, we compared the nature and the relative importance of oxygen exchange in photomixotrophic (PM) and photoautotrophic (PA) suspensions of Euphorbia characias L. with those in intact leaves of the same species. Young and mature leaves, dividing and nondividing cell suspensions were characterized in short-term experiments. On chlorophy...

Ammonium-Accumulation. Bialaphos, Phosphinothricin, Photorespiration, Photosynthesis The application of bialaphos (phosphinothricyl-alanyl-alanine) effects a quick photosynthesis inhibition under atmospheric conditions (400 ppm C 0 2, 21% 0 2). However, under conditions (1000 ppm C 0 2, 2% 0 2) under which photorespiration cannot occur there is no photosynthesis inhibition. In the previous inve...

The effect of O(2) on the CO(2) exchange of detached soybean leaves was measured with a Clark oxygen electrode and infrared carbon dioxide analysers in both open and closed systems.The rate of apparent photosynthesis was inhibited by O(2) while the steady rate of respiration after a few minutes in the dark was not affected. Part of the inhibition of apparent photosynthesis was shown to be a res...

An open system associated with an infrared gas analyzer was employed to study transients in CO2 exchange generated upon darkening preilluminated leaf discs of tobacco (Nicotiana tabacum vars John Williams Broadleaf and Havana Seed). An empirical formula presented previously enabled prediction of the analyzer response under nonsteady state conditions as a function of time and of the leaf CO2 exc...

Photosynthetic carbon metabolism is rate limiting in C3 plants because of a competing process: photorespiration. Photorespiration lowers the energy efficiency of photosynthesis by metabolizing glycolate produced by the oxygenate activity of Rubisco. The chloroplasts of Arabidopsis thaliana have recently been reported to contain a novel respiratory pathway that converts glycolate directly to gly...