It was the work of Jan Anderson, together with Keith Boardman, that showed it was possible to physically separate photosystem I (PSI) from photosystem II (PSII), and it was Jan Anderson who realized the importance of this work in terms of the fluid-mosaic model as applied to the thylakoid membrane. Since then, there has been a steady progress in the development of biochemical procedures to isolate PSII and PSI both for physical and structural studies. Dodecylmaltoside (DM) has emerged as an effective mild detergent for this purpose. DM is a glucoside-based surfactant with a bulky hydrophilic head group composed of two sugar rings and a non-charged alkyl glycoside chain. Two isomers of this molecule exist, differing only in the configuration of the alkyl chain around the anomeric centre of the carbohydrate head group, axial in α-DM and equatorial in β-DM. We have compared the use of α-DM and β-DM for the isolation of supramolecular complexes of PSII by a single-step solubilization of stacked thylakoid membranes isolated from peas. As a result, we have optimized conditions to obtain homogeneous preparations of the C 2 S 2 M 2 and C 2 S 2 supercomplexes following the nomenclature of Dekker & Boekema (2005 Biochim. Biophys. Acta 1706 , 12–39). These PSII–LHCII supercomplexes were subjected to biochemical and structural analyses.