Forty years of microbial photosynthesis research: Where it came from and what it led to

Abstract

What follows is a very personal account of my professional life and the early years that preceded it. I have described the social and economic conditions in America and how the nineteen twenties and thirties nurtured our scientific future. The description of the early part of post-World War II research covers my experience in the areas of nutritional biochemistry, biochemical genetics and proceeds to photosynthesis. The latter era lasted around 35 years. For me the most memorable research accomplishments in which I was a participant during this period was the first demonstration of the primary carboxylation enzyme in an in vitro system in algal and higher plants as well to show that it was structurally associated with the chloroplast.Our group while at Oak Ridge and the University of Massachusetts assembled data that described the complete macromolecular assembly of the photosynthetic apparatus of the unusual photosynthetic green bacterium Chloroflexus aurantiacus and created a model of that system which differed greatly from the chomatophore system for the purple bacteria. For the last decade, my scientific journey, with numerous new colleagues has turned to the exciting area of biomaterials.We characterized and modeled the completely new bacterial intracellular inclusions responsible for the synthesis and degredation of biosynthetic, biodegradable and biocompatible bacterial polyesters in the cytoplasm of Pseudomonads.