Of Cyanobacteria Using The Electrophoresis And Thin Layer Chromatography

Analysis of photosynthetic pigments

Photosynthetic pigments are pigments that absorb light at a specific wavelength, giving a unique color. Carotenoids, chlorophylls, and phycobiliproteins are the three primary pigments involved in the process of photosynthesis, converting light energy into sugar. Cyanobacteria, known before as blue-green algae, perform photosynthesis. Bacteria can use multiple dyes. Although cyanobacteria mainly use chlorophyll (green) and phycocyanin (blue), it also contains carotene (orange) and xanthophylls (yellow). We deducted an experiment to investigate the photosynthetic pigments of cyanobacteria using the electrophoresis and thin layer chromatography (TLC) methods to divide and examine the pigments. The electrophoresis

It also shows the distance migrated by the unknown, and the color of the pigment.

Figure 1

Figure 1 is an exponential graph representation of the Isoelectric Point, and the Distance migrated from table 1. The Isoelectric Point on the x-axis is the independent variable, and the Distance migrated on the y-axis is the dependent variable.

Table 2

Distance migrated by Phycocyanin (unknown)

17mm

Isoelectric Point of Phycocyanin

5.99

In Table 2, The Isoelectric Point of Phycocyanin was found by using the standard curve of figure 1 with the dyes and proteins, which contains the distance migrated and the known isoelectric Point.

Table 3

Tentative ID of pigments

Rf Value

Color

Chlorophyll

0.782

Green

Carotene

0.859

Orange

Xanthophylls

0.936

Yellow

Table 3 represents the results from the TLC methods. Three colors were identified, green for Chlorophyll, orange for Carotene and finally yellow for Xanthophylls. This table shows the calculated Rf Value for each pigment