RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 High efficiency excitation energy transfer in biohybrid quantum dot–bacterial reaction center nanoconjugates
JF bioRxiv
FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
SP 2021.04.20.440209
DO 10.1101/2021.04.20.440209
A1 Giordano Amoruso
A1 Juntai Liu
A1 Daniel W. Polak
A1 Kavita Tiwari
A1 Michael R. Jones
A1 Thomas A. A. Oliver
YR 2021
UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2021/04/20/2021.04.20.440209.abstract
AB Reaction centers (RCs) are the pivotal component of natural photosystems, converting solar energy into the potential difference between separated electrons and holes that is used to power much of biology. RCs from anoxygenic purple photosynthetic bacteria such as Rhodobacter sphaeroides only weakly absorb much of the visible region of the solar spectrum which limits their overall light-harvesting capacity. For in vitro applications such as bio-hybrid photodevices this deficiency can be addressed by effectively coupling RCs with synthetic lightharvesting materials. Here, we studied the time scale and efficiency of Förster resonance energy transfer (FRET) in a nanoconjugate assembled from a synthetic quantum dot (QD) antenna and a tailored RC engineered to be fluorescent. Time-correlated single photon counting spectroscopy of biohybrid conjugates enabled the direct determination of FRET from QDs to attached RCs on a time scale of 26.6 ± 0.1 ns and with a high efficiency of 0.75 ± 0.01.Competing Interest StatementThe authors have declared no competing interest.