Quantum molecular biological transfer models

For the attainment of marvelous electron transfer processes in the natural sequential potential fields, many noncovalentaly-bound donor-acceptor (DA) systems and covalently-bound DA systems " " have been previously reported. Most of them are artificial models of the photosynthesis comprising simple assemblies of the dyad (DA) or triad [donor-spacer-acceptor (DSA)] functional molecules with a chromophore such as a porphyrin. The quantum efficiency of such systems is lower (<25%) compared with the biological systems (=100%), and thus more efforts for constructing more efficient systems are necessary. Some of the covalen-taly-bound DA systems have been designed for the fabrication of molecule-scale devices based on a molecular electron-transport wire and/or highly ordered molecular arrays on the surface. " Most of such studies employed the DA nonconju-gated molecules. 

The key new aspect of our investigation is two-fold first, we base all model parameters on molecular dynamics simulations second, the spin-boson model allows one to account for a very large number of vibrations quantum mechanically. We have demonstrated that the spin-boson model is well suited to describe the coupling between protein motion and electron transfer in biological redox systems. The model, through the spectral function can be matched to correlation functions of the redox energy... 

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