Carotenoids: Biological Functions of Carotenoids and Apocarotenoids in Natural and Artificial Systems

As a Ph.D student, Eleanore Wurtzel innovated gene tagging and isolated the first genes for two-component signaling in bacteria, laying the foundation for study of signaling mechanisms found throughout nature, including plants. With an NSF postdoctoral fellowship, Dr. Wurtzel boldly changed fields from bacterial membrane biochemistry to plant biology, when maize was the only model system. She established some of the first experiments on plant chromatin structure as an NSF Plant Biology postdoctoral fellow at Brookhaven National Laboratory. She then joined Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and began research on maize carotenoid biosynthesis, then a poorly studied area. Dr. Wurtzel next joined the Biological Sciences Department at Lehman College, City University of New York, where she is currently a Full Professor and on the faculty of the CUNY Biology and Biochemistry PhD programs. Eleanore Wurtzel has made fundamental and longstanding contributions to the field of plant carotenoid biosynthesis, plant biochemistry, and plant metabolic engineering which are enabling improvement of crops for sustainable solutions to global vitamin A deficiency affecting the health and mortality of 250 million children worldwide. Dr. Wurtzel is grateful to the many students, postdocs, and visiting scientists who have contributed to her laboratory’s research for which she has been recognized as a Fellow of AAAS, Fellow of ASPB, and most recently as a Fellow of the International Carotenoid Society. Dr. Wurtzel serves as a Monitoring Editor of Plant Physiology. Dr. Wurtzel has also been a long-standing elected member of the Gordon Research Conferences (GRC) Board of Trustees. She has been instrumental at GRC in developing and contributing to programs for women in science. She also founded and chaired the first GRC on Plant Metabolic Engineering and founded the GRC seminar for early career scientists for both the GRC Plant Metabolic Engineering community and the GRC Carotenoids community.

• 1. Ultrafast laser spectroscopic studies on carotenoids in solution and on those bound to photosynthetic pigment-protein complexesHideki Hashimoto and Richard Cogdell2. Assessing photoprotective functions of carotenoids in photosynthetic systems of plants and green algaeRoberto Bassi3. Fluorescence of carotenoids: probing binding site interactions and conformational motion in carotenoproteinsWarren Beck and Justin Rose4. Resonance Raman: A powerful tool to interrogate carotenoids in biological matricesBruno Robert, Bruno Robert, Manuel Llansola Portoles and Andrew A. Pascal5. Engineering the carotenoid biosynthetic pathway to study the function of carotenoids in light-harvesting complexesAndrew Hitchcock, Neil Hunter, David John Kenneth Swainsbury, Pu Qian and George Sutherland6. Carotenoids as proxies for variations in photosynthesis and phenology in response to environmental and climatic changeIngo Ensminger7. Apocarotenoid pigment biosynthesis in non-model plantsGiovanni Giuliano8. Apocarotenoid transport in plantsGiovanni Giuliano9. Screening for apocarotenoid plant growth regulators in ArabidopsisSalim Al Babili, Kunpeng Jia, Alexandra Jazz Dickinson, Yagiz Alagoz and Jianing Mi10. Effects of herbivory on carotenoid biosynthesis and breakdownJonathan Gershenzon and Sirsha Mitra11. Biosynthesis and action of apocarotenoid plant hormones12. Strigolactone Signaling Complex Formation in Yeast: A Paradigm for Studying Hormone-induced Receptor Interaction with Multiple Downstream ProteinsRuifeng Yao, Li Chen, Meng Zhang, Haiyang Yu, Liu Yang, Hongfan Long and Xin Su13. Assessment of dietary carotenoid intake and metabolism in human clinical studiesSteven Clinton and Elizabeth Grainger14. Microsomal Triglyceride Transfer Protein-mediated transfer of beta-carotene from Donor to Acceptor vesicles in vitroLoredana Quadro, Jahangir Iqbal, Mahmood Hussain and Youn-Kyung Kim15. Development and validation of a method to deliver vitamin A into macrophagesJaume Amengual, Pooja Acharya, Molly Black and Glenn Bressner16. Methods for assessing the interaction of apocarotenoids with vertebrate nuclear receptorsEarl Howard Harrison17. A guide for the evaluation of in vitro bioaccessibility of carotenoidsAdriana Z. Mercadante and Ana Augusta O. Xavier18. A fast and simplified method to estimate bioaccessibility of carotenoids from plant tissuesManuel Rodriguez-Concepcion and Luca Morelli19. From organic synthesis of novel carotenoids and apo-carotenoids via metabolism to bio-active carotenoid metabolites and their activity relevance in mice and humansRalph Rühl, Angel R. de Lera, Torsten Bohn, Jean-Francois Landrier, Harald Carlsen, Daniel Merk, Jenny Renaut and Tilman Todt20. Extraction, detection, and imaging of the macular carotenoidsPaul S. Bernstein, Binxing Li, Aruna Gorususpudi and Ranganathan Arunkumar21. Analysis of macular carotenoids in the developing Macaque retina: The timeline of macular pigment developmentJohn Landrum, Vanes Mendez, Yisi Cao, Ramon Gomez and Nartha Neuringer22. Carotenoid Modifying Enzymes in MetazoansJohannes F. von Lintig, Alexander R. Moise and Sepalika Bandara23. Expression and Biochemical Analyses of Proteins Involved in the Transport of Carotenoids and RetinoidsAlexander R. Moise and Johannes F. von Lintig