Nature Communications (Jul 2019)

Three-dimensional view of ultrafast dynamics in photoexcited bacteriorhodopsin

  • Gabriela Nass Kovacs,
  • Jacques-Philippe Colletier,
  • Marie Luise Grünbein,
  • Yang Yang,
  • Till Stensitzki,
  • Alexander Batyuk,
  • Sergio Carbajo,
  • R. Bruce Doak,
  • David Ehrenberg,
  • Lutz Foucar,
  • Raphael Gasper,
  • Alexander Gorel,
  • Mario Hilpert,
  • Marco Kloos,
  • Jason E. Koglin,
  • Jochen Reinstein,
  • Christopher M. Roome,
  • Ramona Schlesinger,
  • Matthew Seaberg,
  • Robert L. Shoeman,
  • Miriam Stricker,
  • Sébastien Boutet,
  • Stefan Haacke,
  • Joachim Heberle,
  • Karsten Heyne,
  • Tatiana Domratcheva,
  • Thomas R. M. Barends,
  • Ilme Schlichting

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-019-10758-0
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 10, no. 1
pp. 1 – 17

Abstract

Read online

Bacteriorhodopsin (bR) is a light-driven proton pump. Here the authors combine time-resolved crystallography at a free-electron laser, ultrafast spectroscopy and quantum chemistry to study the structural changes following multiphoton photoexcitation of bR and find that they occur within 300 fs not only in the light-absorbing chromophore but also in the surrounding protein.