Identification of Residues Potentially Involved in Optical Shifts in the Water-Soluble Chlorophyll a-Binding Protein through Molecular Dynamics Simulations

Reversible light and thermally induced spectral shifts are universally observed in a wide variety of pigment-protein complexes at temperatures ranging from cryogenic to ambient. In this paper, we employed large-scale molecular dynamics (MD) simulations of a prototypical pigment-protein complex to better understand these shifts at a molecular scale. Although multiple mechanisms have been proposed over the years, no verification of these proposals via MD simulations has thus far been performed; our work represents the first step in this direction. From simulations of the water-soluble chlorophyll-binding protein complex, we determined that rearrangements of long hydrogen bonds were unlikely to be the origin of the multiwell landscape features necessary to explain observed spectral shifts. We also assessed small motions of amino acid residues and identified side chain rotations of some of these residues as likely candidates for the origin of relevant multiwell landscape features. The protein free-energy landscapes associated with side chain rotations feature energy barriers of around 1100-1600 cm(-1), in agreement with optical spectroscopy results, with the most promising residue type associated with experimental signatures being serine, which possesses a symmetric triple-well landscape and moment of inertia of a relevant magnitude.