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Updated: Aug 17, 2026

Proton Transfer and Protein Conformation Dynamics in Photosensitive Proteins by Time-resolved Step-scan Fourier-transform Infrared Spectroscopy
Published on: June 27, 2014
Experimental observation of bonding electrons in proteins
V S Lamzin1, R J Morris, Z Dauter
1European Molecular Biology Laboratory, 22603 Hamburg, Germany. Victor@EMBL-Hamburg.DE
Abstract:
We demonstrate with two examples the success and potential of recent developments in x-ray protein crystallography at ultra high resolution. Our preliminary structural analyses using diffraction data collected for the two proteins crambin and savinase show meaningful deviations from the conventional independent spherical atom approximation. A noise-reduction averaging technique enables bonding details of electron distributions in proteins to be revealed experimentally for the first time. We move one step closer to imaging directly the fine details of the electronic structure on which the biological function of a protein is based.
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