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Time for a thread!🧵 How different is the molecular organization of thylakoids in “higher” plants🌱? To find out, we teamed up with @profmattjohnson.bsky.social to dive into spinach chloroplasts with #CryoET ❄️🔬. Curious? ..Read on! #TeamTomo #PlantScience 🧪 🧶🧬 🌾 elifesciences.org/articles/105... 1/🧵

We made an interesting observation about plastoglobules, lipid-protein storage droplets that share one leaflet with thylakoid membranes. We saw that plastoglobules often sat within little holes in the thylakoids 🟠🕳️, perhaps increasing the area of the contact site, facilitating exchange 🔄 3/🧵

Our data enabled us to quantify native thylakoid architecture in the grana. Getting precise numbers is important for modeling photosynthetic regulation. Here’s a comparison to similar measurements made by classical TEM. We’d like to apply #CryoET to the dark-to-light💡 transition in the future. 4/🧵

Contrary to previous models, our native views showed that grana are not perfect cylinders, but have wavy undulating edges 🌊🏄‍♀️. Here we slice through a few grana🥞 from the top– Do you see all the little protein densities in the membranes?🔍 Those are photosynthetic complexes. How to analyze them? 5/🧵