How electric fields affect a molecular twist within light-sensitive proteins
Thursday, February 13, 2020 - 08:50
in Physics & Chemistry
A team of scientists from the Department of Energy's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Stanford University has gained insight into how electric fields affect the way energy from light drives molecular motion and transformation in a protein commonly used in biological imaging. A better understanding of this phenomenon, which is crucial to many processes that occur in biological systems and materials, could enable researchers to finely tune a system's properties to harness these effects, for instance using light to control neurons in the brain. Their findings were published in Science in January.