Almost all life on earth relies on photosynthesis, a process in which light energy is captured and transformed into chemical energy. In photosynthetic eukaryotes, photosynthesis occurs in the chloroplasts, remnant from a long past endosymbiotic event wherein a heterotrophic eukaryote engulfed a free-living photosynthetic bacterium. Today, algae and plant chloroplasts still contain their own reduced set of genes that are essential to photosynthesis and thus to growth and survival. As such, chloroplast function defines primary productivity and maximum yield of all economically important crops, explaining why they are currently a major focus of intense basic and applied research. Indeed, any strategies trying to improve agricultural productivity through photosynthesis engineering will only be achieved with a sophisticated knowledge of all the chloroplast processes, from gene expression to energy conversion. This Research Topic aims to provide a platform to bring together the most up-to-date knowledge about chloroplast biology, from gene expression to energy conversion (both light harvesting and carbon fixation). We also want to move beyond the state of the art and highlight novel and unique contributions to the field, including understanding plastid gene expression, mechanistic insights into light harvesting, novel plastid protein functions, CO2 fixation, and photosynthetic carbon flux, and all implicated regulations. One goal is to relate these basic processes to their potential applications in agriculture and biotechnology.We welcome submissions of Original Research, Review, and Method papers that provide novel insights on including, but not limited to, the following themes:• Plastid gene expression and processing;• New methods/software/pipelines for analyzing plastid genes and transcripts;• Mechanisms of light harvesting;• Regulation of electron transfer;• Carbon metabolism;• C3, C4, and CAM photosynthesis;• Carbon concentrating mechanisms.Note that chloroplast genome sequencing papers are out of the scope of this Research Topic unless they provide new insights into one of the themes described above.
Almost all life on earth relies on photosynthesis, a process in which light energy is captured and transformed into chemical energy. In photosynthetic eukaryotes, photosynthesis occurs in the chloroplasts, remnant from a long past endosymbiotic event wherein a heterotrophic eukaryote engulfed a free-living photosynthetic bacterium. Today, algae and plant chloroplasts still contain their own reduced set of genes that are essential to photosynthesis and thus to growth and survival. As such, chloroplast function defines primary productivity and maximum yield of all economically important crops, explaining why they are currently a major focus of intense basic and applied research. Indeed, any strategies trying to improve agricultural productivity through photosynthesis engineering will only be achieved with a sophisticated knowledge of all the chloroplast processes, from gene expression to energy conversion. This Research Topic aims to provide a platform to bring together the most up-to-date knowledge about chloroplast biology, from gene expression to energy conversion (both light harvesting and carbon fixation). We also want to move beyond the state of the art and highlight novel and unique contributions to the field, including understanding plastid gene expression, mechanistic insights into light harvesting, novel plastid protein functions, CO2 fixation, and photosynthetic carbon flux, and all implicated regulations. One goal is to relate these basic processes to their potential applications in agriculture and biotechnology.We welcome submissions of Original Research, Review, and Method papers that provide novel insights on including, but not limited to, the following themes:• Plastid gene expression and processing;• New methods/software/pipelines for analyzing plastid genes and transcripts;• Mechanisms of light harvesting;• Regulation of electron transfer;• Carbon metabolism;• C3, C4, and CAM photosynthesis;• Carbon concentrating mechanisms.Note that chloroplast genome sequencing papers are out of the scope of this Research Topic unless they provide new insights into one of the themes described above.