Modulation of electron transfer kinetics by protein conformational fluctuations during early-stage photosynthesis

The kinetics of electron transfer during the early stages of the photosynthetic reaction cycle has recently been shown in transient absorption experiments carried out by Wang et al. [Science 316, 747 (2007)] to be strongly influenced by fluctuations in the conformation of the surrounding protein. A model of electron transfer rates in polar solvents developed by Sumi and Marcus using a reaction-diffusion formalism [J. Chem. Phys. 84, 4894 (1986)] was found to be successful in fitting the experimental absorption curves over a roughly 200 ps time interval. The fits were achieved using an empirically determined time-dependent function that described protein conformational relaxation. In the present paper, a microscopic model of this function is suggested, and it is shown that the function can be identified with the dynamic autocorrelation function of intersegment distance fluctuations that occur in a harmonic potential of mean force under the action of fractional Gaussian noise.