This award supports Professor Jane Vanderkooi and two graduate students from the University of Pennsylvania to collaborate in biochemistry research with Professor Josef Friedrich and his graduate students in the Physical Chemistry Institute of the University of Bayreuth. They are combining their complementary expertise in EPR and optical hole burning to study dynamic aspects of protein structure. Proteins are organized and random at the same time, giving rise to a complex energy landscape which, in turn, results in a variety of possible substates. Direct observations of protein structural dynamics near physiologically relevant temperatures is very difficult by conventional methods. This research suggests that conformational states, or structural organization, of protein can be identified by characteristic patterns of spectral holes in an electric field combined with other measurements. By performing comparative hole burning spectroscopy on metal derivatives of cytochrome c , porphyrin, and glasses, under various conditions of pH and pressure, these investigators expect to observe changes in various bonding states of proteins which will improve the understanding of structural organization and randomness in proteins.
