Rhodopsin is a prototypical G proteincoupled receptor that is activated by photoisomerization of its 11-cis-retinal chromophore. Mutant forms of rhodopsin were prepared in which the carboxylic acid counterion was moved relative to the positively charged chromophore Schiff base. Nanosecond time-resolved laser photolysis measurements of wild-type recombinant rhodopsin and two mutant pigments then were used to determine reaction schemes and spectra of their early photolysis intermediates. These results, together with linear dichroism data, yielded detailed structural information concerning chromophore movements during the first microsecond after photolysis. These chromophore structural changes provide a basis for understanding the relative movement of rhodopsin's transmembrane helices 3 and 6 required for activation of rhodopsin. Thus, early structural changes following isomerization of retinal are linked to the activation of this G protein-coupled receptor. Such rapid structural changes lie at the heart of the pharmacologically important signal transduction mechanisms in a large variety of receptors, which use extrinsic activators, but are impossible to study in receptors using diffusible agonist ligands.Rhodopsin is the light-triggered membrane receptor in rod outer segments responsible for dim-light vision. Absorption of light transforms rhodopsin (rho) into an activated state, which interacts with a heterotrimeric G protein to initiate an enzyme cascade leading to visual transduction. To reach this active state, called metarhodopsin (meta) II (1, 2), rho passes through a number of intermediates that have been characterized by UV-visible, Fourier-transform infrared (FTIR), Raman, and NMR spectroscopies, in addition to spin-labeling and biochemical studies (3-10). One way to characterize the intermediates is to trap them at low temperatures. This approach led to the classical ''bleaching'' scheme ( max values in nanometers): rho (498) 3 bathorhodopsin (batho) (542) 3 lumirhodopsin (lumi) (497) 3 meta I (480) 3 meta II (380) Scheme I However, at more physiologically relevant temperatures, time-resolved measurements up to 1 msec after photolysis reveal a new intermediate and a different kinetic scheme (3, 11). The following reaction scheme was proposed to occur during the nanosecond-to-microsecond time regime (3): rho (498) 3 batho (529) ª bsi (477) 3 lumi (492) 3 . . .
Scheme II
The new intermediate, blue-shifted intermediate of rho (bsi), is entropically favored and thus not trapped at low temperatures (11).The role of various structural features of the retinal chromophore in early rho photointermediates has been studied through time-resolved spectral measurements of artificial rho, in which the native chromophore is replaced by synthetically modified retinals (12). In studies of bacteriorhodopsin, timeresolved absorption spectroscopy has been shown to be particularly valuable when combined with site-directed mutagenesis to probe the roles of specific protein residues in different intermediates (13). Unti...