Recognizing Plant Cell authors: Gábor Sipka
Gábor Sipka, first author of Light-adapted charge-separated state of photosystem II. Structural and functional dynamics of the closed reaction center
Current Position: Research associate in the research group of Prof. Dr. Győző Garab and Dr. Petar H. Lambrev, the Laboratory of Photosynthetic Membranes, at the Biological Research Centre (BRC), Szeged, Hungary
Education: PhD in Physics (2018) at the University of Szeged, Faculty of Science and Informatics
Non-scientific Interests: reading, watching movies, Arduino, playing soccer
Brief bio: I started my scientific career as a PhD student in 2012 at the Institute of Medical Physics and Informatics, University of Szeged, Hungary. There, under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Péter Maróti, my task was to investigate what makes the purple non-sulfur photosynthetic bacteria and its reaction center robust and yet flexible enough to function efficiently under different stress conditions, such as induced by heavy metals or high light intensity. I used (quasi) steady-state (fluorescence anisotropy) and kinetic (fluorescence induction, delayed fluorescence) spectroscopic measurements with selective excitation of BChl.
As a predoc, in 2015 I joined the Laboratory of Photosynthetic Membranes of the BRC. In 2017, I was awarded a 4-year Young Investigator Fellowship of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. In the BRC, my research focuses on the elucidation of the nature and the underlying physical mechanism of light-induced structural changes in photosystem II – using a variety of steady-state and time-resolved spectroscopy techniques at physiological and cryogenic temperatures. We actively collaborate with foreign biophysical and structural biology laboratories; I also participate in collaborative projects conducted at the ELI-ALPS laser center in Szeged.
