Cyanobacteria are bacteria that perform oxygenic photosynthesis: light-dependent reactions release oxygen from water. Their photosynthetic machinery operates on thylakoid membranes without a chloroplast or a cell nucleus. This is a particularly useful counterexample to equating photosynthesis with being a plant. Chloroplasts descend from an ancestral cyanobacterial partner through endosymbiosis; present-day cyanobacteria are independent descendants, rather than chloroplasts waiting to become plants. See Alberts et al., Molecular Biology of the Cell: chloroplasts and cyanobacteria.
A genus of oxygenic photosynthetic bacteria. The strain PCC 6803 is a common experimental system for photosynthesis and electron-export studies.
A marine cyanobacterial genus used in experiments on protection supplied by peroxide-removing microbes.
Articles by others on the same topic
There are currently no matching articles.