b Edge rolls bottles sealed with red rubber Suba Seals. The two left-side bottles click here contain aliquots of a C. reinhardtii culture (in vivo assays), the two right-side vessels are filled with in vitro assay reaction mixture having the typical deep blue color of reduced methylviologen Finally, 100–200 μl of the anaerobically adapted algal culture is removed from the cell suspension by a syringe and then injected into

the prepared in vitro assay reaction mixture, piercing through the septum. The flask is then vortexed vigorously to lyse the cells and afterward placed into a shaking water-bath at 37°C for 15 min. The optimum temperature of C. reinhardtii HydA1 is 60°C (Happe and Naber 1993); however, to find a compromise between enzyme activity and long-term stability, 37°C was chosen as a standard temperature. If other temperatures

and incubation times are chosen, it should be checked first how long the H2-evolving https://www.selleckchem.com/pharmacological_MAPK.html activity is linear by sampling the gas every 5–10 min. After incubation, the headspace above the reaction mixture can be analyzed by GC. Gas chromatographic detection of H2 usually utilizes thermal conductivity detectors (TCDs) and argon as a carrier gas. For detailed analyses, a sensitive gas chromatograph should be at hands. Good systems are supplied by Shimadzu, Kyoto, Japan (www.​shimadzu.​com; e.g., GC-2010 equipped with a PLOT fused silica coating molsieve column [5 Å, 10 m by 0.32 mm] from Varian, Palo Alto, CA; www.​varianinc.​com). This system also allows the detection Dichloromethane dehalogenase of

O2, which can be valuable to detect significant O2 contaminations in the samples or to analyze the O2 consumption in S-deprived cells (see below). The hydrogenase activity of whole cells is usually defined as nmoles H2 produced per hour and μg chlorophyll (or cell number). Anaerobic adaptation experiments commonly last for 4–6 h. In C. reinhardtii, in vitro hydrogenase activity can be detected after 5–15 min of bubbling. Hydrogenase activity rises linearly for 2–3 h and then reaches a plateau activity of around 500 nmol H2 h−1 μg Chl−1 (Fig. 2). Photobiological hydrogen production upon sulphur deprivation In S-deprived C. reinhardtii cultures, a very special photosynthetic metabolism develops in which the photosynthetic electron transport chain is significantly changed from what is known as photosynthesis. PSII activity is strongly down-regulated, and the oxidation of organic substances is the main source of electrons, which are proposed to be transferred to the PQ-pool via an NAD(P)H-PQ-oxidoreductase (Mus et al. 2005; Bernard et al. 2006). The electron sinks of photosynthesis change, too, since CO2 fixation becomes undetectable whereas the hydrogenase accepts electrons from the photosynthetic chain (Hemschemeier et al. 2008) (Fig. 1). This algal photohydrogen production has been studied extensively in the last few years. In this chapter, the procedures to induce the H2 metabolism in C.