At La Jolla, we had found that the phycoerythrin fraction in the unicellular alga Porphyridium cruentum (which I had earlier learned to culture on enriched seawater media, thanks to a comment from E. G. Pringsheim) had the same blunted spectrum as that found in Porphyra (later Smithora) naiadum, one of the algae Blinks and I had studied. R. L. Airth in Blinks’s lab had been using electrophoresis to purify its biliproteins and the existence of a protein complex

was being considered. At La Jolla while renewing investigations on the phycobilins, little studied since R. Lemberg’s days, Colm O’hEocha and I had found that column chromatography on tri-calcium phosphate, by the new method of Homer Scott Swingle

and Arne Tiselius, BAY 80-6946 in vitro check details was a powerful new tool for comparative studies of algal biliproteins, leading us, most notably, to establish the natural and wide occurrence of a fraction we called allophycocyanin, presuming it to be the same pigment observed by Lemberg in long-stored material. O’hEocha introduced this methodology to Airth and Blinks during a summer study at the Hopkins Marine Station, leading them to abandon the idea of a complex, as we did for the name P-phycoerythrin we had given, in the interim, to this novel biliprotein. In 1960, R. Lemberg, then an immigrant to Australia, took great pleasure in showing me crystals of R-phycoerythrin preserved in ammonium sulfate on a slide that were in perfect condition after over 30 years.  Some of the simply displayed action spectra from Blinks, and my publication were widely duplicated in textbooks to illustrate selleck chemical spectral assimilation and pigment involvement in representative phototrophic systems of eukaryotes. They were also key to estimating spectral assimilation

curves for photosynthesis with depth in the ocean by the principle tetracosactide algal groups, part of the photosynthesis exhibits that Melvin Calvin had organized as the US contribution to the science pavilion at the 1958 World Fair in Brussels, Belgium. The highlight of the US exhibit was a somewhat Rube Goldberg model of the Calvin–Benson carbon cycle which upon illumination of an artificial leaf traced “lit up” carbon from carbon dioxide, through the various intermediates to sucrose which was ejected as a lump of sugar. Neither could match as crowd pleaser the model of Sputnik that the USSR had on display on the same floor. But in calculating these curves I failed to consider that in broad natural light fields, light absorbed by accessory pigments would have a marked enhancing effect on spectral performance at the ends of the spectrum, notably in phycoerythrin-rich red and blue-green algae (Haxo 1963).