Equilibration kinetics in isolated and membrane-bound photosynthetic reaction centers upon illumination: a method to determine the photoexcitation rate

Abstract

Kinetics of electron transfer, following variation of actinic light intensity, for photosynthetic reaction centers (RCs) of purple bacteria (isolated and membrane-bound) were analyzed by measuring absorbance changes in the primary photoelectron donor absorption band at 865 nm. The bleaching of the primary photoelectron donor absorption band in RCs, following a sudden increase of illumination from the dark to an actinic light intensity of I exp , obeys a simple exponential law with the rate constant ðaI exp þ k rec Þ, in which a is a parameter relating the light intensity, measured in mW/cm 2 , to a corresponding theoretical rate in units of reciprocal seconds, and k rec is the effective rate constant of the charge recombination in the photosynthetic RCs. In this work, a method for determining the a parameter value is developed and experimentally verified for isolated and membrane-bound RCs, allowing for rigorous modeling of RC macromolecule dynamics under varied photoexcitation conditions. Such modeling is necessary for RCs due to alterations of the forward photoexcitation rates and relaxation rates caused by illumination history and intramolecular structural dynamics effects. It is demonstrated that the classical Bouguer-Lambert-Beer formalism can be applied for the samples with relatively low scattering, which is not necessarily the case with strongly scattering media or high light intensity excitation.

Charge Recombination Time Distributions in Photosynthetic Reaction Centers Exposed to Alternating Intervals of Photoexcitation and Dark Relaxation

“…Transient absorption experiments were carried out as described previously . Briefly, absorbance changes of RC samples in a quartz cuvette were probed with a monitoring light beam from a quartz tungsten–halogen (QTH) lamp filtered by monochromators set at 865 nm (slit bandwidth = 20 nm) and placed before and after the cuvette.…”

Effects of the measuring light on the photochemistry of the bacterial photosynthetic reaction center from Rhodobacter sphaeroides

“…Accordingly, Manzo et al (2009) have recently proposed a method to measure a based on the use of an additional orthogonal light beam. Alternatively, Eq.…”