期刊名称:Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
印刷版ISSN:0027-8424
电子版ISSN:1091-6490
出版年度:1987
卷号:84
期号:12
页码:4094-4098
DOI:10.1073/pnas.84.12.4094
语种:English
出版社:The National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
摘要:The removal of metal cations inhibits the deprotonation process of the protonated Schiff base during the photocycle of bacteriorhodopsin. To understand the nature of the involvement of these cations, a spectroscopic and kinetic study was carried out on bacteriorhodopsin samples in which the native Ca2+ and Mg2+ were replaced by Eu3+, a luminescent cation. The decay of Eu3+ emission in bacteriorhodopsin can be fitted to a minimum of three decay components, which are assigned to Eu3+ emission from three different sites. This is supported by the response of the decay components to the presence of 2H2O and to the changes in the Eu3+/bR molar ratio. The number of water molecules coordinated to Eu3+ in each site is determined from the change in its emission lifetime when 2H2O replaces H2O. Most of the emission originates from two "wet" sites of low crystal-field symmetry--e.g., surface sites. Protonated Schiff base deprotonation has no discernable effect on the emission decay of protein-bound Eu3+, suggesting an indirect involvement of metal cations in the deprotonation process. Adding Eu3+ to deionized bacteriorhodopsin increases the emission intensity of each Eu3+ site linearly, but the extent of the deprotonation (and color) changes sigmoidally. This suggests that if only the emitting Eu3+ ions cause the deprotonation and bacteriorhodopsin color change, ions in more than one site must be involved--e.g., by inducing protein conformation changes. The latter could allow deprotonation by the interaction between the protonated Schiff base and a positive field of cations either on the surface or within the protein.