Correlation of electron transfer rate in photosynthetic reaction centers with intraprotein dielectric properties

A number of the electrogenic reactions in photosystem I, photosystem II, and bacterial reaction centers (RC) were comparatively analyzed, and the variation of the dielectric permittivity (epsilon) in the vicinity of electron carriers along the membrane normal was calculated. The value of epsilon was minimal at the core of the complexes and gradually increased towards the periphery. We found that the rate of electron transfer (ET) correlated with the value of the dielectric permittivity: the fastest primary ET reactions occur in the low-polarity core of the complexes within the picosecond time range, whereas slower secondary reactions take place at the high-polarity periphery of the complexes within micro- to millisecond time range. The observed correlation was quantitatively interpreted in the framework of the Marcus theory. We calculated the reorganization energy of ET carriers using their van der Waals volumes and experimentally determined epsilon values. The electronic coupling was calculated by the empirical Moser-Dutton rule for the distance-dependent electron tunneling rate in nonadiabatic ET reactions. We concluded that the local dielectric permittivity inferred from the electrometric measurements could be quantitatively used to estimate the rate constant of ET reactions in membrane proteins with resolved atomic structure with the accuracy of less than one order of magnitude.