Electrostatic control of charge separation in bacterial photosynthesis

Electrostatic interaction energies of the electron carriers with their surroundings in a photosynthetic bacterial reaction center are calculated. The calculations are based on the detailed crystal structure of reaction centers from Rhodopseu-domonas viridis, and use an iterative, self-consistent procedure to evaluate the effects of induced dipoles in the protein and the surrounding membrane. To obtain the free energies of radical-pair states, the calculated electrostatic interaction energies are combined with the experimentally measured midpoint redox potentials of the electron carriers and of bacteriochlorophyll (BChl) and bacteriopheophytin (BPh) in vitro. The P+HL- radical-pair, in which an electron has moved from the primary electron donor (P) to a BPh on the 'L' side of the reaction center (HL), is found to lie approx. 2.0 kcal/mol below the lowest excited singlet state (P*), when the radical-pair is formed in the static crystallographic structure. The reorganization energy for the subsequent relaxation of P+HL- is calculated to be 5.0 kcal/mol, so that the relaxed radical-pair lies about 7 kcal/mol below P*. The unrelaxed P+BL- radical-pair, in which the electron acceptor is the accessory BChl located between P and HL, appears to be essentially isoenergetic with P*.P+BM-, in which an electron moves to the BChl on the 'M' side, is calculated to lie about 5.5 kcal/mol above P*. These results have an estimated error range of +/- 2.5 kcal/mol. They are shown to be relatively insensitive to various details of the model, including the charge distribution in P+, the atomic charges used for the amino acid residues, the boundaries of the structural region that is considered microscopically and the treatments of the histidyl ligands of P and of potentially ionizable amino acids. The calculated free energies are consistent with rapid electron transfer from P* to HL by way of BL, and with a much slower electron transfer to the pigments on the M side. Tyrosine M208 appears to play a particularly important role in lowering the energy of P+BL-. Electrostatic interactions with the protein favor localization of the positive charge of P+ on PM, one of the two BChl molecules that make up the electron donor.