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[Report] Femtosecond structural dynamics drives the trans/cis isomerization in photoactive yellow protein

ScienceNOW - Fetched: May 5th, 2016, 4:00pm UTC

A variety of organisms have evolved mechanisms to detect and respond to light, in which the response is mediated by protein structural changes after photon absorption. The initial step is often the photoisomerization of a conjugated chromophore. Isomerization occurs on ultrafast time scales and is substantially influenced by the chromophore environment. Here we identify structural changes associated with the earliest steps in the trans-to-cis isomerization of the chromophore in photoactive yellow protein. Femtosecond hard x-ray pulses emitted by the Linac Coherent Light Source were used to conduct time-resolved serial femtosecond crystallography on photoactive yellow protein microcrystals over a time range from 100 femtoseconds to 3 picoseconds to determine the structural dynamics of the photoisomerization reaction. Authors: Kanupriya Pande, Christopher D. M. Hutchison, Gerrit Groenhof, Andy Aquila, Josef S. Robinson, Jason Tenboer, Shibom Basu, Sébastien Boutet, Daniel P. DePonte, Mengning Liang, Thomas A. White, Nadia A. Zatsepin, Oleksandr Yefanov, Dmitry Morozov, Dominik Oberthuer, Cornelius Gati, Ganesh Subramanian, Daniel James, Yun Zhao, Jake Koralek, Jennifer Brayshaw, Christopher Kupitz, Chelsie Conrad, Shatabdi Roy-Chowdhury, Jesse D. Coe, Markus Metz, Paulraj Lourdu Xavier, Thomas D. Grant, Jason E. Koglin, Gihan Ketawala, Raimund Fromme, Vukica Šrajer, Robert Henning, John C. H. Spence, Abbas Ourmazd, Peter Schwander, Uwe Weierstall, Matthias Frank, Petra Fromme, Anton Barty, Henry N. Chapman, Keith Moffat, Jasper J. van Thor, Marius Schmidt

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