Study of visual pigment rhodopsin supramolecular organization in photoreceptor membrane by small-angle neutron scattering method with contrast variation

Abstract

Supramolecular organization of rhodopsin in the photoreceptor membrane was investigated by small-angle neutron scattering method. The experiments, which were performed with mixtures of heavy/light water as solvent (contrast variation method), were aimed at obtaining information about the lipid and protein components of the photoreceptor disc membrane separately. It was shown that the packaging density of the rhodopsin molecules in the photoreceptor membrane was unusually high: the distance between the centers of the molecules was approximately 56 Å. The probability of the monomeric state of rhodopsin molecules in the photoreceptor membrane, according to the data obtained, is rather high.

High-throughput SANS experiment on two-detector system of YuMO spectrometer

“…Two-detector system has no such disadvantage. The need of high resolution at the nearest position for the wide spectrum of samples (alconates [15], proteins [16][17][18][19], dendrimers [20][21][22][23][24][25], nanotubes [26], lipids [27][28][29]) leads to conducting the experiments at the nearest position of the well-collimated detector. Consequently the time of measurements range on the spectrometer YuMO is from 3 min [30,31] up to 12h [32,33].…”