Light is an important environmental variable and most organisms have evolved means to sense, exploit or avoid it and to repair detrimental effects on their genome. In general, light absorption is the task of specific chromophores, however other biomolecules such as oligonucleotides also do so which can result in undesired outcomes such as mutations and cancer. Given the biological importance of light-induced processes and applications for imaging, optogenetics, photodynamic therapy or photovoltaics, there is a great interest in understanding the detailed molecular mechanisms of photoinduced processes in proteins and nucleic acids. The processes are typically characterized by time-resolved spectroscopic approaches or computation, inferring structural information on transient species from stable ground state structures. Recently, however, structure determination of excited states or other short-lived species has become possible with the advent of X-ray free-electron lasers. This review gives an overview of the impact of structure on the understanding of photoinduced processes in macromolecules, focusing on systems presented at this Faraday Discussion meeting.

中文翻译：

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斯皮尔斯纪念演讲
入门讲解：结构对核酸和蛋白质中光诱导过程的影响


光是一个重要的环境变量，大多数生物体已经进化出可以感知，利用或避免它并修复对其基因组有害影响的手段。通常，光吸收是特定发色团的任务，但是其他生物分子（例如寡核苷酸）也可以这样做，这可能导致不良结果，例如突变和癌症。鉴于光诱导过程的生物学重要性以及其在成像，光遗传学，光动力疗法或光伏技术中的应用，人们对理解蛋白质和核酸中光诱导过程的详细分子机制有着极大的兴趣。这些过程通常以时间分辨光谱方法或计算为特征，从稳定的基态结构中推断出有关瞬态物质的结构信息。但是最近 随着X射线自由电子激光器的出现，激发态或其他短寿命物种的结构确定成为可能。这篇综述概述了结构对理解大分子中光诱导过程的影响，重点是本次法拉第讨论会议上介绍的系统。