Dick Scalan, Dick Mitterer, Marilyn, Pat Parker, John Hedges, Beth Trust, 1995 |
In early January 1974, I flew down to
Texas from my family home in New Jersey. My one suitcase was filled with woolen
winter clothes, leather boots, and only a few summer things. I brought my
pillow and a typewriter. Parker picked
me up at the airport in his old VW bug, rusted out on the sides. He was a
modest looking man with a small mustache, a bit of a limp, and shaggy brown
hair. Even as the Director of the Institute, he wore old khakis and an
un-ironed short sleeve shirt with no tie. I had formed a different picture of
how he looked based on his Science papers. We drove to Mustang Island,
where the Marine Science Institute was located, with the final portion of the
journey via ferry. Coming from urbanized Southern New Jersey, Port Aransas
seemed like a town literally at the end of the earth for me. The next day I met
Professor Chase Van Baalen. Chase was often mistaken for one of the maintenance
staff. A short fellow with a crew cut, Van Baalen smoked a pipe, and was known
for shoving his lit pipe deep into the pockets of his jeans. His right hand lab
assistant, Rita O’Donnell, took care of the lab glassware and culturing
facility for Chase. She was a crusty, Port Aransan, who also owned and managed
a popular motel with her husband. Parker’s lab manager, Ken Winters, was a
former Ph.D. student of Pat’s. A real Texan, Ken was polite and funny and
fortunately for me, very organized.
I settled in quickly, meeting and
getting to know other graduate students and postdocs. My first mini-project was
to assay naturally occurring iron binding compounds made by microorganisms.
Iron is a limiting nutrient for almost all organisms from microbes to humans.
We were searching for new compounds that assisted bacteria and algae to easily
take up iron without being limited. Others had found these molecules in
cultures, but no one had looked for them in nature. I gathered algal mats from nearby lagoons and
shallow marine sediments, extracted them, and then placed the extracts on a
lawn of bacteria that required an iron-binding compound to grow. We discovered
that organic, iron-binding compounds were widespread in the natural
environment, not just secretions from laboratory microbes. It was a winning
small project, and the subsequent publication, standing the test of time, is
still relevant (Estep et al., 1975).
After the study on iron binding
compounds, I started my Ph.D. project with funding from a NASA Exobiology grant
working with Parker, Van Baalen, and microbiologist/enzymologist F. Robert
Tabita. My Ph.D. research was to purify the enzyme key in fixing carbon dioxide
in photosynthesis—Rubisco--from various organisms, then carry out a series of
complicated experiments to measure how carbon isotope patterns were modified by
Rubisco.
Harmon Craig wrote the first
blockbuster paper on “carbon isotopes in everything” from diamonds to an
unwitting discovery of a C4 grass (Craig, 1953). His later work
tracked major carbon isotope systematics in the world’s oceans. At the same
time, Melvin Calvin and A. A. Benson were using radiocarbon to track the
pathways of carbon fixation (Calvin and Benson, 1948). A paper by Park and
Epstein (1960) linked the two types of studies and measured, for the first
time, the carbon isotope fractionation by the CO2 fixing enzyme Rubisco. Using a purified enzyme, bicarbonate, and
ribulose 1,5-bisphosphate (RuBP), they calculated an isotope fractionation
indicating the lighter isotope of carbon was favored over the heavier one
during the reaction. Not much was known about the structure and function of
Rubisco at this time.
Work in the late 1960s and early 1970s
on the structure and function of Rubisco brought new interest to the carbon
isotope fractionation studies in plants. Bob Tabita, then a recent Ph.D. and
postdoc, brought his skills in purifying Rubisco as an Assistant Professor at
the University of Texas. His work centered on isolating and describing the
different forms of bacterial Rubisco enzymes—their structures, kinetics, and
activations. Rubisco from higher plants has a molecular weight of 550,000 and
is composed of 8 large subunits and 8 small subunits. Park and Epstein’s experiments
with Rubisco carbon isotope fractionation used enzyme from the tomato plant.
My Ph.D. research started with purified
spinach Rubisco followed by isolating and purifying this enzyme from various
microorganisms. The idea behind this work was to figure out why carbon isotope
measurements of modern and ancient sediments and rocks were so different from
one another. Precambrian stromatolites were thought to be microbially produced
structures formed primarily by cyanobacterial primary producers. One question
that persisted was whether or not the Rubisco from cyanobacteria produced the
same degree of carbon isotope fractionation as the enzyme from higher plants.
At the time, Tabita and others thought that the cyanobacterial enzyme had a
different structural form from the higher plant Rubsico, although subsequently
this was shown not to be the case. The photosynthetic bacteria, Rhodospirillum
rubrum, produced two different forms of the enzyme: form I, the high
molecular weight form, and form II, a Rubisco with a smaller molecular weight.
We wondered whether the different forms might be associated with different
enzymatic mechanisms and consequently different isotope fractionations.
At the time Rubisco isotope research was a
very hot field. A group from New Zealand published experiments using soybean
enzyme (Christeller et al., 1976), which showed little effect of bicarbonate
concentrations or temperature on fractionation. A team led by Bill Sackett at
Texas A&M published work using sorghum Rubisco and measured extremely
variable carbon isotope fractionations We did not find this work compelling
given the large differences between the two temperature treatments. Further,
Sackett’s group used a cell-free extract, but not purified protein. Deleens et
al. (1974) experiments gave carbon isotope fractionation with a range that was
completely beyond that known measurements in natural samples. Neither of these
groups used Rubisco from taxonomic groups other than higher plants.
Abstract to my first meeting at American Society for Microbiology, New Orleans, 1977 |
My challenge was to grow microorganisms
in large quantities from liters of pure cultures and to purify the Rubisco to
homogeneity, i.e., isolating it from all other proteins. The work required that
I learn sterile technique and microbial culturing. Once the organisms had been
harvested, enzyme purification required column chromatography using size
exclusion principles. The location of Rubisco separated by chromatography was
assayed by radioactive bicarbonate (14C) uptake measurements. Once
the Rubisco was identified, I purified large amounts, milligrams of pure
protein, for the isotope experiments. Rubisco was incubated with milligram
quantities of the substrate RuBP with an excess of bicarbonate in a buffered
solution. When all of the RuBP was used up, each of the 40 experiments was
terminated and the product, phosphoglyceric acid (PGA) was purified by
crystallization.
Once the PGA was purified, I proceeded
to Pat Parker’s aging “Craig line”—a variation of hand-blown glass tubing
modified from Harmon Craig’s original vacuum system. My sample was then pushed
into a furnace in which oxygen was added, the PGA was combusted, and CO2 was produced. The carbon
isotope combustion of carbon dioxide was analyzed on a 1960s version Nuclide 6”
isotope ratio mass spectrometer (IRMS) complete with now archaic electronic
devices and strip chart recorders for recording the isotope compositions. In
those days, measurements were completed by hand using rulers and slide rules to
calculate the isotope values. Our work showed that different enzyme forms and
different metal cofactors resulted in variations in isotope patterns. We also showed that the enzymatic isotope change
between the first product of photosynthesis and carbon dioxide was greater than
that measured in vivo with whole plants and cells. This finding led to
further studies by Graham Farquhar, Joe Berry and Marion O’Leary (1981), who
developed mathematical equations for carbon isotope fractionation by C3 and C4 plants.
My research still provides the
foundations of understanding the evolution of photosynthesis on earth, how
climate cycles have changed over time, and how plants manage their water
budgets.
No comments:
Post a Comment