Structural analysis of Chlorosome

Bacteriochlorophyll c assembly is a light-harvesting organelle in plants whose effective molecular weight amounts up to several mega-Daltons. Recently, we successfully determined structure of Bacteriochlorophyll c in atomic resolution (Publication: Egawa et al PNAS (2006)).

We measured many intermolecular distances from uniformly ¹³C-labeled sample by using ¹³C spin diffusion method. The measured distances were used as structure restraints in the simulated-annealing molecular dynamics calculation.