scholarly journals Adsorption of a single protein interacting with multiple ligands: Inner radial humps in the concentration profiles induced by non-uniform ligand density distributions

2009 ◽  
Vol 32 (23-24) ◽  
pp. 4059-4068 ◽  
Author(s):  
E. Riccardi ◽  
A. I. Liapis
Author(s):  
J. Borejdo ◽  
S. Burlacu

Polarization of fluorescence is a classical method to assess orientation or mobility of macromolecules. It has been a common practice to measure polarization of fluorescence through a microscope to characterize orientation or mobility of intracellular organelles, for example anisotropic bands in striated muscle. Recently, we have extended this technique to characterize single protein molecules. The scientific question concerned the current problem in muscle motility: whether myosin heads or actin filaments change orientation during contraction. The classical view is that the force-generating step in muscle is caused by change in orientation of myosin head (subfragment-1 or SI) relative to the axis of thin filament. The molecular impeller which causes this change resides at the interface between actin and SI, but it is not clear whether only the myosin head or both SI and actin change orientation during contraction. Most studies assume that observed orientational change in myosin head is a reflection of the fact that myosin is an active entity and actin serves merely as a passive "rail" on which myosin moves.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Denis Artiukhin ◽  
Patrick Eschenbach ◽  
Johannes Neugebauer

We present a computational analysis of the asymmetry in reaction center models of photosystem I, photosystem II, and bacteria from <i>Synechococcus elongatus</i>, <i>Thermococcus vulcanus</i>, and <i>Rhodobacter sphaeroides</i>, respectively. The recently developed FDE-diab methodology [J. Chem. Phys., 148 (2018), 214104] allowed us to effectively avoid the spin-density overdelocalization error characteristic for standard Kohn–Sham Density Functional Theory and to reliably calculate spin-density distributions and electronic couplings for a number of molecular systems ranging from dimeric models in vacuum to large protein including up to about 2000 atoms. The calculated spin densities showed a good agreement with available experimental results and were used to validate reaction center models reported in the literature. We demonstrated that the applied theoretical approach is very sensitive to changes in molecular structures and relative orientation of molecules. This makes FDE-diab a valuable tool for electronic structure calculations of large photosynthetic models effectively complementing the existing experimental techniques.


1992 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 121-125 ◽  
Author(s):  
Claire Schaffnit ◽  
Jacques Silvy ◽  
C. T.J. Dodson

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