Issues

On cover of this edition of Biochemical Journal, phototrophic purple bacteria surround their photosynthetic reaction centre with light-harvesting complex 1 (LH1). The lowest-energy phototrophs of the Blastochloris genus have an additional LH1 subunit called γ (shown in red). Learn more in the commentary by Hitchcock and colleagues (pp 455-460), highlighting the recent study of Namoon et al. (Biochem J (2022) 479 (24): 2449–2463), which demonstrated that the γ subunit red-shifts absorbance of the Blastochloris viridis LH1 complex from 972 nm to 1018 nm, further into the near-infrared region of the spectrum where photons are lower energy but more abundant.