Publication Date:
2011-06-11
Description:
Vision begins with photoisomerization of visual pigments. Thermal energy can complement photon energy to drive photoisomerization, but it also triggers spontaneous pigment activation as noise that interferes with light detection. For half a century, the mechanism underlying this dark noise has remained controversial. We report here a quantitative relation between a pigment's photoactivation energy and its peak-absorption wavelength, lambda(max). Using this relation and assuming that pigment activations by light and heat go through the same ground-state isomerization energy barrier, we can predict the relative noise of diverse pigments with multi-vibrational-mode thermal statistics. The agreement between predictions and our measurements strongly suggests that pigment noise arises from canonical isomerization. The predicted high noise for pigments with lambda(max) in the infrared presumably explains why they apparently do not exist in nature.〈br /〉〈br /〉〈a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4349410/" target="_blank"〉〈img src="https://static.pubmed.gov/portal/portal3rc.fcgi/4089621/img/3977009" border="0"〉〈/a〉 〈a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4349410/" target="_blank"〉This paper as free author manuscript - peer-reviewed and accepted for publication〈/a〉〈br /〉〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Notes: 〈/span〉Luo, Dong-Gen -- Yue, Wendy W S -- Ala-Laurila, Petri -- Yau, King-Wai -- EY06837/EY/NEI NIH HHS/ -- R01 EY006837/EY/NEI NIH HHS/ -- R37 EY006837/EY/NEI NIH HHS/ -- Howard Hughes Medical Institute/ -- New York, N.Y. -- Science. 2011 Jun 10;332(6035):1307-12. doi: 10.1126/science.1200172.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Author address: 〈/span〉Solomon H. Snyder Department of Neuroscience, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore, MD 21205, USA. dgluo@jhmi.edu〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Record origin:〈/span〉 〈a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21659602" target="_blank"〉PubMed〈/a〉
Keywords:
Ambystoma
;
Animals
;
Bufo marinus
;
Goldfish
;
Hot Temperature
;
In Vitro Techniques
;
Light
;
*Light Signal Transduction
;
Mice
;
Mice, Inbred C57BL
;
Photons
;
Retinal Cone Photoreceptor Cells/physiology
;
Retinal Pigments/chemistry/*physiology/radiation effects
;
Rhodopsin/physiology
Print ISSN:
0036-8075
Electronic ISSN:
1095-9203
Topics:
Biology
,
Chemistry and Pharmacology
,
Computer Science
,
Medicine
,
Natural Sciences in General
,
Physics
