Primary charge separation in Photosystem II

In this Minireview, we discuss a number of issues on the primary photosynthetic reactions of the green plant Photosystem II. We discuss the origin of the 683 and 679 nm absorption bands of the PS II RC complex and suggest that these forms may reflect the single-site spectrum with dominant contributions from the zero-phonon line and a pronounced approximately 80 cm(-1) phonon side band, respectively. The couplings between the six central RC chlorins are probably very similar and, therefore, a 'multimer' model arises in which there is no 'special pair' and in which for each realization of the disorder the excitation may be dynamically localized on basically any combination of neighbouring chlorins. The key features of our model for the primary reactions in PS II include ultrafast (