Faster way to probe proteins
Proteins can take many different shapes, and those shapes help determine each protein’s function. Analyzing those structures can tell scientists a great deal about how a protein behaves, but many of the methods now used to study structure require proteins to be crystallized or otherwise altered from their natural state.Now, MIT researchers have developed a way to analyze proteins that doesn’t require any pre-treatment. The technique is also extremely fast, allowing scientists to see, for the first time, how a protein changes its shape over picoseconds, or trillionths of a second.The researchers, led by chemistry professor Andrei Tokmakoff and postdoc Carlos Baiz, describe their new technique this month in the journal Analyst. Their approach builds on a technology known as two-dimensional infrared spectroscopy, which works by shining pulses of infrared light on a molecule and measuring the resulting molecular vibrations. In the new paper, the researchers came up with a...