Presented at GRC, CO2 Assimilation in Plants:Genome to Biome, Aussois, France, Sept. 11-16, 2005.

Abstract: Rubisco is a Storage/Sink protein, convertible to Enediol, that is the single enzyme for carboxylation. Rubisco-activase assembles the enzyme in light. A theory and model is advanced, introducing the conept that steady state photosynthesis is controlled by two steps. The first step is the synthesis of the enediol enzyme and the second step is carboxylation/oxygenation. It is found that the two-process theory of Farquhar et al is incompatible with the biochemical kinetics of the rubisco reaction. It is shown that photosynthesis is neither limited by Rubisco at low CO2, nor by energy for RuBP regeneration at high CO2.
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