Max Planck Institute for Medical Research, Jahnstr. 29, 69120 Heidelberg, Germany.
Faraday Discuss. 2018 Apr 1;207:9-26. doi: 10.1039/c8fd00058a. Epub 2018 Mar 27.
Light is an important environmental variable and most organisms have evolved means to sense, exploit or avoid it and to repair detrimental effects on their genome. In general, light absorption is the task of specific chromophores, however other biomolecules such as oligonucleotides also do so which can result in undesired outcomes such as mutations and cancer. Given the biological importance of light-induced processes and applications for imaging, optogenetics, photodynamic therapy or photovoltaics, there is a great interest in understanding the detailed molecular mechanisms of photoinduced processes in proteins and nucleic acids. The processes are typically characterized by time-resolved spectroscopic approaches or computation, inferring structural information on transient species from stable ground state structures. Recently, however, structure determination of excited states or other short-lived species has become possible with the advent of X-ray free-electron lasers. This review gives an overview of the impact of structure on the understanding of photoinduced processes in macromolecules, focusing on systems presented at this Faraday Discussion meeting.
光是一种重要的环境变量，大多数生物体已经进化出感知、利用或避免光线的方法，并修复对其基因组的有害影响。一般来说，光吸收是特定生色团的任务，然而其他生物分子，如寡核苷酸，也可以这样做，这可能导致突变和癌症等不良后果。鉴于光诱导过程的生物学重要性以及在成像、光遗传学、光动力疗法或光伏中的应用，人们非常有兴趣了解蛋白质和核酸中光诱导过程的详细分子机制。这些过程通常通过时间分辨光谱方法或计算来表征，从稳定的基态结构推断瞬态物种的结构信息。然而，最近，随着自由电子 X 射线激光器的出现，已经可以确定激发态或其他短寿命物种的结构。这篇综述概述了结构对理解大分子中光诱导过程的影响，重点介绍了本次 Faraday 讨论会上介绍的系统。
