Moreover, there are few fluorescent proteins or dyes the excitation wavelengths of which do not coincide with those of carotenoids and chlorophylls. E2 conjugating inhibitor Because the resolution limit of optical microscopy is ∼200 nm, and due to the difficulties in tagging GW3965 price proteins of interest, protein organization in the thylakoid membrane cannot be currently resolved through confocal optical microscopy. As a result, electron microscopy (EM) and atomic force microscopy (AFM), which are more invasive than optical microscopy and can resolve features on a short length scale, have been used to image the thylakoid

membrane (Dekker and Boekma 2005; Kirchhoff et al. 2008b). EM imaging of A. thaliana has recently been used to understand the arrangement of proteins QNZ purchase in the thylakoid (Boekma et al. 2000; Dekker and Boekma 2005; Kouřil et al. 2012a). Thylakoid membranes are isolated and then negatively stained for contrast. Betterle and coworkers observed that the distance between

PSII centers decreased during acclimation in wild type A. thaliana but not in the npq4 mutant (Betterle et al. 2009). Another common EM technique is freeze-fracture EM, in which thylakoids are frozen and then split along the lipid bilayer such that the transmembrane proteins remain on one side of the split membrane (for review, see Staehelin 2003). Using freeze-fracture EM, the Ruban group observed clustering of the LHCs on the timescales of qE induction (Johnson et al. 2011). One drawback of

using these EM techniques is the intensive sample preparation that is required. Negative staining requires fixing and dehydrating the grana, and freeze-fracture images are made with metallic replicas made from the frozen samples. In this way, the sample preparation techniques may impact the arrangement of proteins (Kirchhoff et al. 2008b). To cope with these experimental drawbacks, there has recently been effort to use cryo EM and tomography to image unstained spinach and pea chloroplasts. In cryo EM, thylakoids or chloroplasts are flash frozen 2-hydroxyphytanoyl-CoA lyase at cryogenic temperatures to create vitreous samples that can then be sectioned (Dall’Osto et al. 2006; Kouřil et al. 2011). The advantage to cryo EM is that the samples remain hydrated, with the water in the sample forming a non-crystalline, vitreous ice. This technique has allowed Kouřil to examine the native 3D structure of the grana membrane and the arrangement of PSII within the membrane (Kouřil et al. 2012b). Although there are some experimental challenges associated with cryo EM (Daum et al. 2010; De Carlo et al. 2002), it shows much promise for future use in studying the organization of proteins in the chloroplast before and during qE. In addition to EM-based techniques, researchers have imaged thylakoid membranes using AFM. In AFM, samples are placed on a mica surface exposed to air and probed with a cantilever. An image is created using the height of the sample for contrast (Kirchhoff et al. 2008b).