Abstract: | An oxygen-evolving complex has been highly purified from the thermophilic cyanobacterium Synechococcus sp. The complex, which reproducibly showed 5 major polypeptide bands of 47, 40, 35, 30 and 9 kDa on SDS-polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis and contained 3.2 Mn per QA, had an oxygen-evolving activity of 300–400 μmol/mg chl per h in the presence of 5 mM MnCl2; or CaCl2. The complex most likely represents a minimum functional unit of the photosynthetic oxygen evolution. |