Chemists Get Electrons To 'Break On Through To The Other Side'

The connections between physics (electrons) and biology (cell processes) amaze me...

In the famous Robert Frost poem, "The Road Not Taken," the persona, forced to travel one of two roads, takes the one less traveled by, and "that has made all the difference."

Chemists at Washington University in St. Louis and Stanford University, in kinship with Frost, have modified a key protein in a bacterium to move electrons along a pathway not normally traveled by. They got this to happen 70 percent of the time. That yield "makes all the difference."

For years, scientists studying photosynthesis have noted that electrons in photosynthetic bacteria always choose one of two identical pathways of electron transport in the reaction center (RC) protein, which is the factory for photosynthesis. The electrons always go to one pigment , sometimes called the "right" side, shunning the left. The molecule-to-molecule movement of electrons stimulated by sunlight is called charge separation. It's the basic modus operandi of photosynthesis, whereby plants and some bacteria use sunlight to produce chemical energy. The reaction center protein is like a forest with two roads. The chemists got the electrons to take the path not traveled.

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