Journal article

Femtosecond stimulated Raman study of the photoactive flavoprotein AppABLUF

CR Hall, IA Heisler, GA Jones, JE Frost, AA Gil, PJ Tonge, SR Meech

Chemical Physics Letters | ELSEVIER | Published : 2017

Abstract

Femtosecond stimulated Raman spectroscopy (FSRS) is applied to study the photocycle of a blue light using flavin (BLUF) domain photoreceptor, AppABLUF. It is shown that FSRS spectra are sensitive to the light adapted state of the protein and probe its excited state dynamics. The dominant contribution to the most sensitive excited state Raman active modes is from flavin ring modes. However, TD-DFT calculations for excited state structures indicate that reproduction and assignment of the experimentally observed spectral shift will require high level calculations on the flavin in its specific protein environment.

University of Melbourne Researchers

Grants

Awarded by National Science Foundation


Funding Acknowledgements

SRM and PJT are grateful to EPSRC (EP/G002916, EP/J009481 and EP/N033647/1) and NSF (CHE-1223819) for funding and JF thanks EPSRC for the award of a studentship. The calculations presented IN THIS paper were carried out on the High Performance Computing Cluster supported by the Research and Specialist Computing Support service at the University of East Anglia. We are grateful to Dr. Sergey Laptenok for preparation of the AppABLUF samples studied.