Department of Chemistry, Stanford University, Stanford, California 94305-5080, United States.
J Am Chem Soc. 2011 Aug 31;133(34):13236-9. doi: 10.1021/ja2042589. Epub 2011 Aug 10.
The role of electric fields in important biological processes such as binding and catalysis has been studied almost exclusively by computational methods. Experimental measurements of the local electric field in macromolecules are possible using suitably calibrated vibrational probes. Here we demonstrate that the vibrational transitions of phosphate groups are highly sensitive to an electric field and show how that sensitivity can be quantified, allowing electric field measurements to be made in phosphate-containing biological systems without chemical modification.
电场在结合和催化等重要生物过程中的作用几乎完全通过计算方法进行了研究。使用经过适当校准的振动探针可以在大分子中测量局部电场。在这里,我们证明了磷酸基团的振动跃迁对电场非常敏感,并展示了如何量化这种敏感性,从而可以在不进行化学修饰的情况下在含磷酸的生物系统中进行电场测量。