Topic summary

RuBP

RuBP

Extracted from the Wikipedia article Ribulose 1,5-bisphosphate.

Measurement

RuBP can be measured isotopically via the conversion of CO2 and RuBP into glyceraldehyde 3-phosphate. G3P can then be measured using an enzymatic optical assay. Given the abundance of RuBP in biological samples, an added difficulty is distinguishing particular reservoirs of the substrate, such as the RuBP internal to a chloroplast vs external. One approach to resolving this is by subtractive inference, or measuring the total RuBP of a system, removing a reservoir (e.g. by centrifugation), re-measuring the total RuBP, and using the difference to infer the concentration in the given repository.