1. Static Disorder in Excitation Energies of the Fenna–Matthews–Olson Protein: Structure-Based Theory Meets Experiment
- Author
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Thomas Renger, Julian Adolphs, Marten L. Chaillet, Frank Müh, Daniel J. Cole, Alex W. Chin, Alexander S. Fokas, Florian Lengauer, Institut des Nanosciences de Paris (INSP), Sorbonne Université (SU)-Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), Photonique et cohérence de spin (INSP-E12), and Sorbonne Université (SU)-Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS)-Sorbonne Université (SU)-Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS)
- Subjects
Letter ,Protein Conformation ,[PHYS.PHYS.PHYS-BIO-PH]Physics [physics]/Physics [physics]/Biological Physics [physics.bio-ph] ,Monte Carlo method ,Light-Harvesting Protein Complexes ,010402 general chemistry ,01 natural sciences ,Molecular physics ,[PHYS.PHYS.PHYS-COMP-PH]Physics [physics]/Physics [physics]/Computational Physics [physics.comp-ph] ,Protein structure ,[PHYS.QPHY]Physics [physics]/Quantum Physics [quant-ph] ,[INFO.INFO-TS]Computer Science [cs]/Signal and Image Processing ,0103 physical sciences ,General Materials Science ,Physical and Theoretical Chemistry ,Spectroscopy ,Conformational isomerism ,Density Functional Theory ,ComputingMilieux_MISCELLANEOUS ,[PHYS.COND.CM-MSQHE]Physics [physics]/Condensed Matter [cond-mat]/Mesoscopic Systems and Quantum Hall Effect [cond-mat.mes-hall] ,Central limit theorem ,Physics ,Physics::Biological Physics ,Quantitative Biology::Biomolecules ,010304 chemical physics ,Circular Dichroism ,[INFO.INFO-AO]Computer Science [cs]/Computer Arithmetic ,[PHYS.PHYS.PHYS-ATM-PH]Physics [physics]/Physics [physics]/Atomic and Molecular Clusters [physics.atm-clus] ,Electrostatics ,[INFO.INFO-MO]Computer Science [cs]/Modeling and Simulation ,0104 chemical sciences ,Distribution function ,[PHYS.COND.CM-MS]Physics [physics]/Condensed Matter [cond-mat]/Materials Science [cond-mat.mtrl-sci] ,Quantum Theory ,[PHYS.PHYS.PHYS-CHEM-PH]Physics [physics]/Physics [physics]/Chemical Physics [physics.chem-ph] ,Monte Carlo Method ,[PHYS.COND.CM-SCM]Physics [physics]/Condensed Matter [cond-mat]/Soft Condensed Matter [cond-mat.soft] ,Excitation - Abstract
Inhomogeneous broadening of optical lines of the Fenna-Matthews-Olson (FMO) light-harvesting protein is investigated by combining a Monte Carlo sampling of low-energy conformational substates of the protein with a quantum chemical/electrostatic calculation of local transition energies (site energies) of the pigments. The good agreement between the optical spectra calculated for the inhomogeneous ensemble and the experimental data demonstrates that electrostatics is the dominant contributor to static disorder in site energies. Rotamers of polar amino acid side chains are found to cause bimodal distribution functions of site energy shifts, which can be probed by hole burning and single-molecule spectroscopy. When summing over the large number of contributions, the resulting distribution functions of the site energies become Gaussians, and the correlations in site energy fluctuations at different sites practically average to zero. These results demonstrate that static disorder in the FMO protein is in the realm of the central limit theorem of statistics.
- Published
- 2020
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