Before revision:  We demonstrate that the - often overlooked - spatially extended but short-lived excitonic delocalization across RC and LH units plays a relevant role in general photosynthetic systems, as it causes a redistribution of direct absorption towards the charge separation unit. Using the complete core complex of Rhodospirillum rubrum, we verify experimentally an 80 \% increase in the direct optical absorption of the RC in situ as compared to isolated RCs. Numerical calculations reveal that similar enhancements can be expected for a wide variety of photosynthetic units in both plant and bacterial systems, suggesting that this mechanism is conserved across species and providing a clear new design principle for light-harvesting nanostructures
After revision:  We demonstrate that the - often overlooked - spatially extended but short-lived excitonic delocalization across RC and LH units plays a relevant role in general photosynthetic systems, as it causes a redistribution of dipole strengths that benefits the absorption cross section of the optical bands associated with the RC of several species. While we prove that this redistribution is robust to the microscopic details of the dephasing between these units in the purple bacterium Rhodospirillum rubrum, we are able to show that the redistribution witnesses a more fragile, but persistent, coherent population dynamics which directs excitations from the LH towards the RC units under incoherent illumination and physiological conditions. Stochastic optimisation allows us to delineate clear guidelines and develop simple analytic expressions, in order to achieve directed coherent population dynamics in artificial nano-structures.