Abstract 2665 From copper economy to copper overload in the green lineage

I will present our work on the spectrum of Cu nutrition states in Chlamydomonas, a single cell alga and a reference organism for dissecting metabolism in the green lineage. When faced with Cu deficiency, Chlamydomonas up-regulates assimilatory copper transporters (CTR proteins) and reduces its inventory of copper-containing proteins by replacing them with copper-independent catalysts. In situations of Cu starvation or sustained deficiency, Chlamydomonas can remove Cu from an abundant cuproprotein, plastocyanin in photosynthesis, and reuse it in a different - more critical for life – protein, cytochrome oxidase.