Welcome to Fujii Lab!

Ritsuko Fujii's research interests focus on the excited- and ground-state structures and functions of photosynthetic pigments, i.e. carotenoids and chlorophylls. They play a crucial role in the primary energy- and electron-transfer processes in photosynthesis. Photosynthetic pigments do not contain rare elements and are composed only of abundant elements on Earth, but they achieve efficient photoreactions by binding to pigment-protein complexes. The structures of photosynthetic pigments in protein, including distortions and relative arrangements, control the primary process of photosynthesis.