[Seminar] Biomolecular Wires of Electric Bacteria: Insights & Opportunities

Title: Biomolecular Wires of Electric Bacteria: Insights and Opportunities

Speaker: Prof. Julea Butt, School of Biological Sciences & School of Chemistry, University of East Anglia, UK

Abstract: Electron transfer along a series of protein cofactors over several nanometers is widely used for energy storage and conversion in biology. Prominent examples are found in respiratory complexes of the inner mitochondrial membrane and in light-harvesting Photosystems I and II. Typically, the redox-active protein cofactors are separated by ≥1 nm (edge-to-edge), and the space between them is occupied by components of the protein matrix. A different situation is found in the multiheme cytochrome biomolecular wires produced by species bacteria, including Shewanella and Geobacter, capable of electron exchange with electrodes. For these proteins, a defining feature is close-packed c-type hemes often in van der Waals contact and arranged as approximately linear chains that span the tertiary structure. This lecture will review structures of these cytochrome biowires, methods to quantify their heme-to-heme electron transfer rates, and opportunities to harness their facile electron transfer for photocatalysis.