{"doi":"10.21203/rs.3.rs-2736786/v1","title":"De novo design of energy transfer proteins housing excitonically coupled chlorophyll special pairs","abstract":"<title>Abstract</title> Natural photosystems couple light harvesting to charge separation using a “special pair” of chlorophyll molecules that accepts excitation energy from the antenna and initiates an electron-transfer cascade. To investigate the photophysics of special pairs independent of complexities of native photosynthetic proteins, and as a first step towards synthetic photosystems for new energy conversion technologies, we designed C<sub>2</sub>-symmetric proteins that precisely position chlorophyll dimers. X-ray crystallography shows that one designed protein binds two chlorophylls in a binding orientation matching native special pairs, while a second positions them in a previously unseen geometry. Spectroscopy reveals excitonic coupling, and fluorescence lifetime imaging demonstrates energy transfer. We designed special pair proteins to assemble into 24-chlorophyll octahedral nanocages; the design model and cryo-EM structure are nearly identical. The design accuracy and energy transfer function of these special pair proteins suggest that <italic>de novo</italic> design of artificial photosynthetic systems is within reach of current computational methods.","journal":"Research Square","year":2023,"id":406627,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":0,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.9466,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2023-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":546936,"name":"Shunzhi Wang","orcid":"0000-0001-5033-7478","position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":667585,"name":"Madison Kennedy","orcid":"0000-0003-3422-9172","position":2,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":1185476,"name":"Mariano Curti","orcid":"0000-0002-3721-4358","position":3,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":1159173,"name":"George A. 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