Excitation pressure regulates the activation energy for recombination events in the photosystem II reaction centres of Chlamydomonas reinhardtii.

Using in vivo thermoluminescence, we examined the effects of growth irradiance and growth temperature on charge recombination events in photosystem II reaction centres of the model green alga Chlamydomonas reinhardtii. We report that growth at increasing irradiance at either 29 or 15 °C resulted in comparable downward shifts in the temperature peak maxima (TM) for S2QB– charge pair recombination events, with minimal changes in S2QA– recombination events. This indicates that such growth conditions decrease the activation energy required for S2QB– charge pair recombination events with no concomitant change in the activation energy for S2QA– recombination events. This resulted in a decrease in the ΔTM between S2QA– and S2QB– recombination events, which was reversible when shifting cells from low to high irradiance and back to low irradiance at 29 °C. We interpret these results to indicate that the redox potential of QB was modulated independently of QA, which consequently narrowed the redox potential gap bet...