This suggests that proteorhodopsins are a major energy-transducing mechanism to harvest solar energy in the surface ocean. Sunlight drives virtually all life on Earth's surface, with about 50% of primary productivity occurring in marine systems (1). Rhodopsins, a diverse class of light‐sensitive proteins found in various life domains, have attracted considerable interest for their potential applications in sustainable synthetic biology. These proteins exhibit remarkable photochemical properties, undergoing conformational changes upon light. All known phototrophic metabolisms on Earth rely on one of three categories of energy-converting pigments: chlorophyll- a (rarely - d), bacteriochlorophyll- a (rarely - b), and retinal, which is the chromophore in rhodopsins. While the significance of chlorophylls in solar energy capture has been. Microbial rhodopsins are major contributors to the solar energy captured in the sea Laura Gómez-Consarnau1,2*, John A. Cutter6, Deli Wang7, Brian Seegers8, Javier Arístegui9, Jed A. They can do so thanks to a protein called rhodopsin. Jarone Pinhassi is working to ascertain how this happens and also highlights the importance of the process in global carbon.
