How does the electron get to the other side? : The 1988 Nobel prize in Chemistry
✍ Scribed by Hugo Scheer
- Publisher
- Elsevier Science
- Year
- 1989
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 712 KB
- Volume
- 3
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 1011-1344
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
a publication titled "Three-dimensional Crystals of a Membrane Protein Complex:
The Photosynthetic Reaction Centre from Rhodopseudomonas viridis" indicated to the photobiological community that something extraordinary had happened. The core of the photosynthetic unit of this bacterium, a huge integral membrane complex of 140 kDalton molecular weight, had been crystallized by Hartmut Michel in the laboratory of Dieter Oesterhelt.
Two years later, the first pictures of the arrangement of its prosthetic groups at atomic resolution were published by J. Deisenhofer, 0. Epp, K. Miki, R. Huber and H. Michel. These groups (four hemes, four bacteriochlorophylls, two bacteriopheophytins, two quinones, one iron) are responsible for the ultrafast and largely irreversible primary charge separation across the photosynthetic membrane. The structure of the surrounding and strongly interacting protein followed early in 1985, during a conference R. Huber J. Deisenbofer (left), H. Michel (right)