The paper entitled “Differential Expression of Rubisco in Sporophyte and Gametophyte of Some Marine Macroalgae” was published online on Jan 20, 2011 in PLoS ONE. The first author of this paper is Chao Wang—the PhD candidate of the research group for the algae physiology and development in the Institute of Oceanology, CAS (IOCAS).

In this paper, systematic comparative analysis of the process of photosynthetic carbon assimilation and electron transport were carried out for some marine macroalgae of different types of life history. For these algae, the analysis for the relationship between the chromosome ploidy and the expression level of Rubisco (ribulose-1, 5-bisphosphate carboxylase/oxygenase), a key enzyme of photosynthetic CO2 fixation, was studied on the molecular level. Results indicated that, although the photosynthetic electron transport was linear related to the biomass and complexity of algae, the expression of Rubisco was related to the chromosome ploidy, which showed that the gene expression of Rubisco was notably higher in algal gametophytes than in the sporophytes. This research paper was of great significance in terms of  revealing the regulatory mechanism of the life history of macroalgae, the molecular regulation process of the chromosome ploidy for the biomass and furthermore the production of the marine macroalge.

This study was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China, which was the first key foundation project on macroalgae in the institute. This project has passed the interim assessment organized by the department of life sciences of the National Natural Science Foundation of China. Positive evaluation was given by the expert group. The comprehensive evaluation was excellent.