Organisation of proteins by porphyrins
A lot of work has been done engineering proteins to form arrays using many methods, but to date there has not been much work done using the porphyrins within a protein (i.e. haem) to organise proteins. To this end we have been working on creating synthetic haem-analogue porphyrins that can be bound to cytochrome b562 with the aim of linking the porphyrins together into arrays of two or more porphyrins. Characterising a large number of these porphyrin-protein architectures should allow the tuning of the properties of a potential system.
It is hoped that this method could then be extended to cover proteins other than cytochrome b562, in particular myoglobin.