Aromatic amino acids, electronic spectra

Debye and Edwards noted two components in the decay of low temperature protein phosphorescence. The greater part of the decay was exponential in character having lifetimes on the order of several seconds. A weak, and much longer-lived component, however, was reported to have the same emission spectrum but a non-exponential decay. Debye and Edwards claimed that this emission was a result of radical recombination following photoejection of an aromatic amino acid electron into... 

Figure 11 shows the result of this experiment on a solution of 5 mM N-acetyl tryptophan and 0.2 mM 3-N-carboxy-methyl lumiflavin, hereafter simply called flavin (see Figure 10). Positive enhancements can be observed for the aromatic C-2, C-4 and C-6 protons, while the CH2 group shows emission. This polarization pattern corresponds with a tryptophyl radical in which the electron spin is delocalized over the aromatic ring. It can further be noted that almost no flavin polarization is present in the difference spectrum. Figure 11c (weak lines are present at 2.6 and 4.0 ppm). This is due to cancellation of recombination and escape polarization as will be discussed in Section 5. The mechanism of the photoreaction undoubtedly involves triplet flavin (17). Since 1-N-methyl tryptophan shows similar CIDNP effects, the primary step most probably is electron transfer to the photo-excited flavin. This is also supported by a flash photolysis study by Heelis and Phillips (18). The nature of the primary step in the photoreactions with amino acids is important in view of the interpretation of "accessibility" of an amino acid side chain in a protein as seen by the photo-CIDNP method. This question is therefore the subject of further study.

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