Ding, Yonghong, Alexey S. Kiryutin, Alexandra V. Yurkovskaya, Denis V. Sosnovsky, Renad Z. Sagdeev, Saskia Bannister, Tilman Kottke, et al. “Nuclear Spin-Hyperpolarization Generated in a Flavoprotein under Illumination: Experimental Field-Dependence and Theoretical Level Crossing Analysis.” Scientific Reports 9, no. 1 (December 2019): 18436.
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-54671-4
The solid-state photo-chemically induced dynamic nuclear polarization (photo-CIDNP) effect generates non-equilibrium nuclear spin polarization in frozen electron-transfer proteins upon illumination and radical-pair formation. The effect can be observed in various natural photosynthetic reaction center proteins using magic-angle spinning (MAS) nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy, and in a flavin-binding light-oxygen-voltage (LOV) domain of the blue-light receptor phototropin. In the latter system, a functionally instrumental cysteine has been mutated to interrupt the natural cysteineinvolving photochemistry allowing for an electron transfer from a more distant tryptophan to the excited flavin mononucleotide chromophore. We explored the solid-state photo-CIDNP effect and its mechanisms in phototropin-LOV1-C57S from the green alga Chlamydomonas reinhardtii by using fieldcycling solution NMR. We observed the 13C and, to our knowledge, for the first time, 15N photo-CIDNP signals from phototropin-LOV1-C57S. Additionally, the 1H photo-CIDNP signals of residual water in the deuterated buffer of the protein were detected. The relative strengths of the photo-CIDNP effect from the three types of nuclei, 1H, 13C and 15N were measured in dependence of the magnetic field, showing their maximum polarizations at different magnetic fields. Theoretical level crossing analysis demonstrates that anisotropic mechanisms play the dominant role at high magnetic fields.