Goals of the Forschergruppe FOR 526
The intention of this consortium of biologists, chemists and physicists is to work in interdisciplinary projects on the understanding of the primary processes of three principle blue-light sensitive photoreceptor domains LOV, Cryptochrome and BLUF. Our main aim is the investigation of these chromophore-binding domains in an in-vitro approach that allows addressing the question of signal state generation in a most precise manner. In vivo research related to blue-light effects are performed in many laboratories world wide. For a detailed in vitro analysis a group of scientists has made a commitment to work closely together for at least three years. They bring into this group a strong experience in several aspects of photoceceptor analysis including protein expression, many different facets of time resolved spectroscopy and structure analysis. These three aspects have to be promoted from the beginning in order to establish a rapidly growing interactive project, allowing the biologist to learn from spectroscopy and structural analysis and to express proteins and protein domains that are most interesting from a mechanistical point of view, and where the spectroscopists and crystallographers try their best to gain the maximal information from protein material that is expressible only in small amounts.