Dynamics in electron transfer protein complexes

Molecular recognition in protein complexes involved in electron transfer.

Introduction Electron transfer reactions involving protein complexes are important in many biological processes, including photosynthesis, respiration, nitrogen fixation and steroid synthesis. The interprotein electron transfer reaction occurs either by orbital overlap or through a number of chemical bonds in the polypeptide chain that act as pathways for the electrons to communicate with the t...

Protein electron transfer: Dynamics and statistics.

Electron transfer between redox proteins participating in energy chains of biology is required to proceed with high energetic efficiency, minimizing losses of redox energy to heat. Within the standard models of electron transfer, this requirement, combined with the need for unidirectional (preferably activationless) transitions, is translated into the need to minimize the reorganization energy ...

Gated electron transfer as a probe of the configurational dynamics of peptide-protein complexes.

Gated electron-transfer measurements are used to probe the configurational dynamics of complexes formed between small metallopeptides and cytochrome c. The results show that that an apparently subtle chemical alteration of the metallopeptide produces significant changes to the dynamics of the peptide-protein complex.

Protein conformational dynamics probed by single-molecule electron transfer.

Electron transfer is used as a probe for angstrom-scale structural changes in single protein molecules. In a flavin reductase, the fluorescence of flavin is quenched by a nearby tyrosine residue by means of photo-induced electron transfer. By probing the fluorescence lifetime of the single flavin on a photon-by-photon basis, we were able to observe the variation of flavin-tyrosine distance over...

Electron transfer between metal complexes: retrospective.