Electrostatics and electrodynamics of bacteriorhodopsin

The stationary electric dichroism of bacteriorhodopsin is in qualitative, but not quantitative, agreement with the orientation function for disks having a permanent dipole directed perpendicular to the plane and an induced dipole in the plane. Fits of the orientation function to data measured at low field strengths demonstrate: an increase of the permanent dipole moment mu with the square of the disk radius r2, whereas the polarizability alpha increases with r4; the ionic strength dependence is small for mu and clearly stronger for alpha; the permanent dipole moment is 4x10(6) D at r = 0.5 micron. According to the risetime constants, the induced dipole does not saturate and increases to 4x10(8) D at 40kV/cm and r = 0.5 micron. The data indicate that the permanent dipole is not of some interfacial character but is due to a real assymetry of the charge distribution. The experimental dipole moment per protein monomer is approximately 55 D, whereas calculations based on the structure of Grigorieff et al. (Grigorieff, N., T.A. Ceska, K.H. Downing, J.M. Baldwin, and R. Henderson. 1996. Electron-crystallographic refinement of the structure of bacteriorhodopsin. J. Mol. Biol. 259:393–421) provide a dipole moment of approximately 570 D. The difference is probably due to a nonsymmetric distribution of charged lipid residues. It is concluded that experimental dipole moments reflect the mu-potential at the plane of shear for rotational diffusion, in analogy to the sigma-potential used for translational diffusion. It is suggested that the permanent dipole of bacteriorhodopsin supports proton transport by attraction of protons inside and repulsion of protons outside of the cell. Dichroism rise curves at field strengths between E = 150 and 800 V/cm reveal an exponential component with time constants tau 3r in the range between 1 and 40 ms, which is not found in Brownian dynamics simulations on a disk structure using hydrodynamic and electric parameters characteristic of bacteriorhodopsin disks. The experimental data suggest that this process reflects a cooperative change of the bacteriorhodopsin structure, which is induced already at a remarkably low field strength of approximately 150 V/cm