Aquatic photosynthesis provides the planet with almost half of biomass production and CO2 fixation. Different organisms contribute to this goal, each carrying a unique set of molecular tools to adapt to the different ecological niches in which they grow.

Water, however, can be a difficult environment to perform photosynthesis: variables such as sunlight intensity and spectrum, temperature, pH, or nutrients can fluctuate rapidly and irregularly. These variations represent a continuous challenge to aquatic organisms, which need to optimize their photosynthetic efficiency and, at the same time, avoid damage, by responding to changes that can be as fast as a few seconds.

To thrive in such a fluctuating environment, different aquatic organisms have developed distinct photoregulatory mechanisms that are activated on timescales that range from the (sub)second up to days, and from conformational changes of single pigments up to remodeling the entire photosynthetic apparatus.

Despite the enormous contribution of aquatic photosynthetic organisms to global primary production, their response to rapid environmental changes still poses a series of open questions to the community of photosynthesis and plant science. Understanding how photoregulation is activated across different scales can help us push the boundaries of fundamental knowledge on natural photosynthesis. It can also provide us with the design principles to optimize aquaculture for food, pharma, and biofuel production or to produce more robust, bio-inspired photovoltaics – among many others.

We welcome submissions of all types, on topics that include, but are not limited to, the following subtopics relating to aquatic photoregulation:
• Photoprotection;
• Photoreception;
• Light-acclimation;
• Evolution of photoregulation;
• Novel experimental and computational methods to study photoregulation in aquatic organisms, for instance, biophysics and modeling.

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Frontiers in Plant Science

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