Electron Paramagnetic Resonance Study of Radiation Damage in Photosynthetic Reaction Center Crystals

Electron paramagnetic resonance (EPR) was used to simultaneously study radiation-induced cofactor reduction and damaging radical formation in single crystals of the bacterial reaction center (RC). Crystals of Fe-removed/Zn-replaced RC protein from Rhodobacter (R.) sphaeroides R26 were irradiated with varied radiation doses at cryogenic temperature and analyzed for radiation-induced free radical formation and alteration of light-induced photosynthetic electron transfer activity using high-field (HF) D-band (130 GHz) and X-band (9.5 GHz) EPR spectroscopies. These analyses show that the formation of radiation-induced free radicals saturated at doses 1 order of magnitude smaller than the amount of radiation at which protein crystals lose their diffraction quality, while light-induced RC activity was found to be lost at radiation doses at least 1 order of magnitude lower than the dose at which radiation-induced radicals exhibited saturation. HF D-band EPR spectra provide direct evidence for radiation-induced reduction of the quinones and possibly other cofactors. These results demonstrate that substantial radiation damage is likely to have occurred during X-ray diffraction data collection used for photosynthetic RC structure determination. Thus, both radiation-induced loss of photochemical activity in RC crystals and reduction of the quinones are important factors that must be considered when correlating spectroscopic and crystallographic measurements of quinone site structures.