Perelman A, Shaltiel J, Sendersky E, Schwarz R., 2015
Modulation of pigment level is an essential adaptation response in many photosynthetic organisms who adjust light harvesting to environmental conditions and thus avoid oxidative damage by excess absorbed light. Cyanobacteria possess a pigment complex, the phycobilisome, which harvests light energy and transfers it to the photo-synthetic reaction center under normal conditions. In times of stress (starvation), this complex is degraded. Cyanobacterial mutants have been previously identified, using a visual screen, that are unable to decrease their light-harvesting phycobilisome content in response to nutrient deprivation. Perelman et al. (p. 948) describe the application of fluorescence-activated cell sorting to isolate Cyanobacterial mutants. Their method has advantages over the visual screen in that it is neither laborious nor time-consuming. The authors demonstrate that their method can also distinguish between partial phenotypes and does not generate a high rate of false positives unlike the visual screening method.
