Three-dimensional view of ultrafast dynamics in photoexcited bacteriorhodopsin in the multiphoton regime and biological relevance

R J Dwayne Miller; Olivier Paré-Labrosse; Antoine Sarracini; Jessica E Besaw

doi:10.1038/s41467-020-14971-0

Three-dimensional view of ultrafast dynamics in photoexcited bacteriorhodopsin in the multiphoton regime and biological relevance

Nat Commun. 2020 Mar 6;11(1):1240. doi: 10.1038/s41467-020-14971-0.

Authors

R J Dwayne Miller^{1

2}, Olivier Paré-Labrosse^{3

4}, Antoine Sarracini⁴, Jessica E Besaw⁴

Affiliations

¹ Max Planck Institute for the Structure and Dynamics of Matter, Luruper Chaussee 149, 22761, Hamburg, Germany. [email protected].
² Departments of Chemistry and Physics, University of Toronto, 80 St. George Street, Toronto, ON, M5S 3H6, Canada. [email protected].
³ Max Planck Institute for the Structure and Dynamics of Matter, Luruper Chaussee 149, 22761, Hamburg, Germany.
⁴ Departments of Chemistry and Physics, University of Toronto, 80 St. George Street, Toronto, ON, M5S 3H6, Canada.

Abstract

How does chemistry scale in complexity to unerringly direct biological functions? Nass Kovacs et al. have shown that bacteriorhodopsin undergoes structural changes tantalizingly similar to the expected pathway even under excessive excitation. Is the protein structure so highly evolved that it directs all deposited energy into the designed function?

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MeSH terms

Bacteriorhodopsins*
Photons
Retinaldehyde

Substances

Bacteriorhodopsins
Retinaldehyde