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Probing the heterogeneous structure of eumelanin using ultrafast vibrational fingerprinting.

ABSTRACT: Eumelanin is a brown-black biological pigment with sunscreen and radical scavenging functions important to numerous organisms. Eumelanin is also a promising redox-active material for energy conversion and storage, but the chemical structures present in this heterogeneous pigment remain unknown, limiting understanding of the properties of its light-responsive subunits. Here, we introduce an ultrafast vibrational fingerprinting approach for probing the structure and interactions of chromophores in heterogeneous materials like eumelanin. Specifically, transient vibrational spectra in the double-bond stretching region are recorded for subsets of electronic chromophores photoselected by an ultrafast excitation pulse tuned through the UV-visible spectrum. All subsets show a common vibrational fingerprint, indicating that the diverse electronic absorbers in eumelanin, regardless of transition energy, contain the same distribution of IR-active functional groups. Aggregation of chromophores diverse in oxidation state is the key structural property underlying the universal, ultrafast deactivation behavior of eumelanin in response to photoexcitation with any wavelength.

SUBMITTER: Grieco C

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7486937 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Probing the heterogeneous structure of eumelanin using ultrafast vibrational fingerprinting.

Grieco Christopher C Kohl Forrest R FR Hanes Alex T AT Kohler Bern B

Nature communications 20200911 1

Eumelanin is a brown-black biological pigment with sunscreen and radical scavenging functions important to numerous organisms. Eumelanin is also a promising redox-active material for energy conversion and storage, but the chemical structures present in this heterogeneous pigment remain unknown, limiting understanding of the properties of its light-responsive subunits. Here, we introduce an ultrafast vibrational fingerprinting approach for probing the structure and interactions of chromophores in ...[more]

PMID: 32917892

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Project description:To accelerate previous RNA structure probing approaches, which focus on analyzing one RNA sequence at a time, we have developed FragSeq, a high-throughput RNA structure probing method that uses high-throughput RNA sequencing to identify single-stranded RNA (ssRNA) regions from fragments generated by nuclease P1, which is specific for single-stranded nucleic acids. In the accompanying study, we show that we can accurately and simultaneously map ssRNA regions in multiple non-coding RNAs with known structure in experiments probing the entire mouse nuclear transcriptome. We carried out probing in two cell types to assess reproducibility. We also identified and experimentally validated structured regions in ncRNAs never previously probed. We examined mouse nuclear RNA from two cell types: undifferentiated embryonic stem cells (UNDIFF) and cells differentiated into neural precursors (D5NP). For each cell type, nuclear RNA was purified and deproteinized, denatured, and refolded in vitro, from which we prepared three barcoded samples: "nuclease" (RNA partially digested with P1 ssRNA-specific nuclease, yielding 5'-PO4/3'-OH end chemistry at each cleavage site), "control" (control for "nuclease" sample to idenfity endogenous 5'-PO4/3'-OH), and "PNK" (same as "control" but followed by a polynucleotide kinase treatment to convert 5'-OH/3'-cyclic-phosphate ends to clonable 5'-PO4/3'-OH ends). Resulting RNA fragments were cloned using the SOLiD Small RNA Expression Kit (SREK) protocol, which ligates linkers only to 5'-PO4/3'-OH containing RNA, enriching for clones of products resulting from P1 cleavage in "nuclease" sample and selecting against random degradation. Two cell types, three treatments each, thus resulted in six barcoded samples total (barcodes 01, 02, 04, 05, 07, 08). Four other barcoded samples were prepared for separate experiments not used in our study (barcodes 03, 06, 09, 10), so their preparation is not described here. The total run of ten barcodes was done on the ABI SOLiD3 platform and a custom algorithm (FragSeq v0.0.1) was used to compute "cutting scores" (as described in our paper) that show ssRNA regions in hundreds of ncRNAs.

Dataset Information

Probing the heterogeneous structure of eumelanin using ultrafast vibrational fingerprinting.

Publications

Probing the heterogeneous structure of eumelanin using ultrafast vibrational fingerprinting.

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