Mitochondrial responses to intracellular pulses of photosynthetic oxygen.

When submitting anaerobic algal cells to a series of saturating flashes, transient absorption changes of mitochondrial origin were detected, showing the characteristic flash-number dependence of photosynthetic oxygen evolution. The faster kinetic event is the oxidation of heme a(3) of the cytochrome-c oxidase, which reaches a maximum at [unk]3.5 ms before again being reduced within 20 ms. The oxidation of cytochrome c involves an initial submillisecond lag, and its half-time is [unk]3.3 ms. Another component, probably indicating oxidation of heme a, is seen around 607 nm, with a kinetic behavior similar to that of cytochrome c. The fast time scale of these reactions excludes long-range diffusion and supports a direct intracellular trapping of O(2). It is estimated that, under appropriate conditions, the yield of this process is >30%. The linearity of these responses with respect to the amplitude of the oxygen pulse implies that a single turnover of the cytochrome oxidase is involved. These results suggest that the intracellular oxygen pathway may be of physiological importance in green algae. On the other hand, this technique seems promising both as an alternative to polarographic detection of photosynthetic oxygen and as a means of studying the cytochrome oxidase response in vivo to single-turnover oxygen pulses.