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 complexes Hideki Hashimoto and Richard Cogdell 2. Assessing photoprotective functions of carotenoids in photosynthetic systems of plants and green algae Roberto Bassi 3. Fluorescence of carotenoids: probing binding site interactions and conformational motion in carotenoproteins Warren Beck and Justin Rose 4. Resonance Raman: A powerful tool to interrogate carotenoids in biological matrices Bruno Robert, Bruno Robert, Manuel Llansola Portoles and Andrew A. Pascal 5. Engineering the carotenoid biosynthetic pathway to study the function of carotenoids in light-harvesting complexes Andrew Hitchcock, Neil Hunter, David John Kenneth Swainsbury, Pu Qian and George Sutherland 6. Carotenoids as proxies for variations in photosynthesis and phenology in response to environmental and climatic change Ingo Ensminger 7. Apocarotenoid pigment biosynthesis in non-model plants Giovanni Giuliano 8. Apocarotenoid transport in plants Giovanni Giuliano 9. Screening for apocarotenoid plant growth regulators in Arabidopsis Salim Al Babili, Kunpeng Jia, Alexandra Jazz Dickinson, Yagiz Alagoz and Jianing Mi 10. Effects of herbivory on carotenoid biosynthesis and breakdown Jonathan Gershenzon and Sirsha Mitra 11. Biosynthesis and action of apocarotenoid plant hormones 12. Strigolactone Signaling Complex Formation in Yeast: A Paradigm for Studying Hormone-induced Receptor Interaction with Multiple Downstream Proteins Ruifeng Yao, Li Chen, Meng Zhang, Haiyang Yu, Liu Yang, Hongfan Long and Xin Su 13. Assessment of dietary carotenoid intake and metabolism in human clinical studies Steven Clinton and Elizabeth Grainger 14. Microsomal Triglyceride Transfer Protein-mediated transfer of beta-carotene from Donor to Acceptor vesicles in vitro Loredana Quadro, Jahangir Iqbal, Mahmood Hussain and Youn-Kyung Kim 15. Development and validation of a method to deliver vitamin A into macrophages Jaume Amengual, Pooja Acharya, Molly Black and Glenn Bressner 16. Methods for assessing the interaction of apocarotenoids with vertebrate nuclear receptors Earl Howard Harrison 17. A guide for the evaluation of in vitro bioaccessibility of carotenoids Adriana Z. Mercadante and Ana Augusta O. Xavier 18. A fast and simplified method to estimate bioaccessibility of carotenoids from plant tissues Manuel Rodriguez-Concepcion and Luca Morelli 19. From organic synthesis of novel carotenoids and apo-carotenoids via metabolism to bio-active carotenoid metabolites and their activity relevance in mice and humans Ralph Rühl, Angel R. de Lera, Torsten Bohn, Jean-Francois Landrier, Harald Carlsen, Daniel Merk, Jenny Renaut and Tilman Todt 20. Extraction, detection, and imaging of the macular carotenoids Paul S. Bernstein, Binxing Li, Aruna Gorususpudi and Ranganathan Arunkumar 21. Analysis of macular carotenoids in the developing Macaque retina: The timeline of macular pigment development John Landrum, Vanes Mendez, Yisi Cao, Ramon Gomez and Nartha Neuringer 22. Carotenoid Modifying Enzymes in Metazoans Johannes F. von Lintig, Alexander R. Moise and Sepalika Bandara 23. Expression and Biochemical Analyses of Proteins Involved in the Transport of Carotenoids and Retinoids Alexander R. Moise and Johannes F. von Lintig