Our Work Covered in the Science in School x ILL Popular Science Series

Our research on the structures of photosynthetic protein complexes was featured in the Science in School x ILL popular science series. Science in School is an educational journal published by EIROforum, a collaboration of eight Europe’s leading intergovernmental research organizations: CERN, EMBL, ESA, ESO, ESRF, EUROfusion, European XFEL and ILL. The article was produced in collaboration with the Institut Laue-Langevin (ILL) in Grenoble, France, home for the largest European neutron source.

Membrane proteins involved in photosynthesis require a lipid-like environment to remain stable outside the cell. For structural studies, researchers therefore use detergent molecules that surround and stabilize these proteins in solution. However, detergent molecules also scatter neutrons, making it difficult to distinguish the protein from the surrounding detergent and potentially leading to inaccurate estimates of the protein’s size and shape.

This is exactly the challenge we tackled in our 2022 publication “Invisible” Detergents Enable a Reliable Determination of Solution Structures of Native Photosystems by Small-Angle Neutron Scattering. By replacing hydrogen atoms in the detergent with deuterium, we matched the neutron scattering properties of the detergent to the surrounding solvent, rendering the detergent effectively invisible in the neutron scattering experiment. This contrast-matching approach allowed us to observe only the photosystem, resulting in a significantly more accurate determination of its structure in solution.

Read full article in English: https://scienceinschool.org/article/2026/neutrons-elucidate-the-mysteries-of-photosynthesis/

Banner image credit: Andreas Haar Larsen/Tutorials on Small-Angle Scattering; adaped from Midgaard et al./FEBS