Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin - Experimentelle Biophysik

Arita Silapetere

One of the fascinating questions in research is to explore lights interaction with living organisms. In the focal point of this topic are photoreceptors. Light photon is absorbed by photoreceptor triggering cellular singling cascade. This phototransduction cascade plays an important role in all living organism adaptation to surrounding environment. In nature there exists a broad range of photoactivable proteins that vary in their functionality and wavelength sensitivity.

Throughout my research work I will concentrate on investigating avena sativa Light-Oxygen-Voltage (asLOV2) domain and sodium pump Krokinobacter eikastus rhodopsin 2 (KR2). These proteins are of particular interest due to their potential biomedical applications, instantaneous response to incident photon and high expression yields in E.coli. To investigate the molecular dynamics of these model systems I apply spectroscopical methods such as flash-photolysis spectroscopy, vibrational Raman spectroscopy (collaboration with Prof. Dr. Hildebrant workgroup in Technical University), and time resolved Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (collaboration with Prof. Dr. Kennis group in VU University Amsterdam) with temporal resolution up to femtoseconds. Major part of the research work is to achieve greater profundity of the photodynamics of aforementioned photoreceptors by establishing novel spectroscopic tools - uncanonical amino acids as infrared probes to investigating site-specific dynamics and intrinsic environmental changes (cooperation with Prof.Dr. Budisa group in Technical University Berlin).