Cryptochromes opsins

Young It is not so much a question of what the opsins are doing, but that of the nature of cr3rptochrome, which is a promiscuous protein. When do you expect to find cryptochrome by itself, as opposed to stuck with a dozen or so partners What would you imagine that those partnerships might do to assays of this sort Presumably these in vitro assays that have been done in A rabidopsis and algae have been quite distinct from the in vivo situation. 

It is theoretically possible that cryptochromes do not function as photopigments, but are required either for the production of another photopigment, or for the signal transduction pathway of another photopigment. Such a pigment would need to be fully resistant to severe vitamin A depletion (since photic immediate-early gene induction in the SCN is fully preserved in RBP I mice but lost in mice) and so is unlikely to be opsin-... 

Kosbash Russell Foster, do you take issue with the fact that it is cryptochrome plus one or more opsins ... 

Young Perhaps the only remaining door left is what opsin does cryptochrome control, if it does that ... 

Fig. 3. Examples of natural photoantenna chromophores (2) 5,10-methenyltetrahydrofolate (MTHF), a blue light photoreceptor pigment present in photolyase and some cryptochromes (3) Pheophytin a, the primary electron acceptor in cyanobacterial oxygenic photosynthesis. (4) 11-cis-retinal, which is involved as sensory photoreceptor component in the opsin-based visual process of animals and (5) the p-hydroxy-benzylidene-imidazolinone chromophore (HBDI) of the green fluorescent protein from bioluminescent marine species.

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