Abstract
The study is the first known exploration of photosynthetic membranes dynamics in living plants by high resolution quasielastic neutron scattering spectroscopy. We investigated the mobility and flexibility of thylakoid membranes in common duckweed (Landoltia punctata) and identified dynamics across various length scales corresponding to individual membranes and membranes stack. We employed classical models typically used to study lipid bilayers to characterize the undulation modes and rigidity of the membranes and reveal how structural variations influence the observed complex dynamics. Our findings show that the stacks of thylakoids in duckweed behave as rigid systems, exhibiting an effective bending coefficient in the lower range associated with surfactant membranes. In contrast, the single thylakoid leaflets display greater apparent flexibility and are well situated within the bi-continuous surfactant phase dynamics. While our observations enhance the understanding of the intricate architecture and mobility of photosynthetic cellular machinery, they also highlight the limitations of applying ideal lipid membranes models to describe complex biological systems. This work opens more questions and the need for further investigations across extended length and time scales, as well as the importance of rigorous sample preparation and experimental control.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | 38810 |
| Journal | Scientific Reports |
| Volume | 15 |
| Issue number | 1 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Dec 2025 |
Funding
This research used resources at the Spallation Neutron Source, a DOE Office of Science User Facility operated by the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The beam time was allocated to SNS-NSE, BL-15, on proposal number IPTS-31361 and to EQ-SANS, BL-6, on proposal number IPTS-28852. The authors acknowledge Dr. Kevin Weiss and Qiu Zhang for biochemistry lab support. Notice: This manuscript has been authored by UT-Battelle, LLC, under contract DE-AC05-00OR22725 with the US Department of Energy (DOE). The US government retains and the publisher, by accepting the article for publication, acknowledges that the US government retains a nonexclusive, paid-up, irrevocable, worldwide license to publish or reproduce the published form of this manuscript, or allow others to do so, for US government purposes. DOE will provide public access to these results of federally sponsored research in accordance with the DOE Public Access Plan (https://www.energy.gov/doe-public-access-plan). The authors acknowledge the use of the following software for data analysis: drtsans software: GitHub - ElsevierSoftwareX/SOFTX-D-22-00051, DrSpine software: https://jugit.fz-juelich.de/nse/drspine, and Jscatter software: https://jscatter.readthedocs.io/en/latest/Installation.html.