Maximizing photosynthetic efficiency and culture productivity in cyanobacteria upon minimizing the phycobilisome light-harvesting antenna size

A phycocyanin-deletion mutant of Synechocystis (cyanobacteria) was generated upon replacement of the CPC-operon with a kanamycin resistance cassette. The Δcpc transformant strains (Δcpc) exhibited a green phenotype, compared to the blue-green of the wild type (WT), lacked the distinct phycocyanin absorbance at 625 nm, and had a lower Chl per cell content and a lower PSI/PSII reaction center ratio compared to the WT. Molecular and genetic analyses showed replacement of all WT copies of the Synechocystis DNA with the transgenic version, thereby achieving genomic DNA homoplasmy. Biochemical analyses showed the absence of the phycocyanin α- and β-subunits, and the overexpression of the kanamycin resistance NPTI protein in the Δcpc. Physiological analyses revealed a higher, by a factor of about 2, intensity for the saturation of photosynthesis in the Δcpc compared to the WT. Under limiting intensities of illumination, growth of the Δcpc was slower than that of the WT. This difference in the rate of cell duplication diminished gradually as growth irradiance increased. Identical rates of cell duplication of about 13 h for both WT and Δcpc were observed at about 800 μmol photons m− 2 s− 1 or greater. Culture productivity analyses under simulated bright sunlight and high cell-density conditions showed that biomass accumulation by the Δcpc was 1.57-times greater than that achieved by the WT. Thus, the work provides first-time direct evidence of the applicability of the Truncated Light-harvesting Antenna (TLA)-concept in cyanobacteria, entailing substantial improvements in the photosynthetic efficiency and productivity of mass cultures upon minimizing the phycobilisome light-harvesting antenna size.