Long-lived quantum coherence in photosynthetic complexes at physiological temperature

By Gitt Panitchayangkoon, Dugan Hayes, Kelly A. Fransted, J. Caram, E. Harel, Jianzhong Wen, Robert Eugene Blankenship, G. Engel. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2010

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Photosynthetic antenna complexes capture and concentrate solar radiation by transferring the excitation to the reaction center that stores energy from the photon in chemical bonds. This process occurs with near-perfect quantum efficiency. Recent experiments at cryogenic temperatures have revealed that coherent energy transfer—a wave-like transfer mechanism—occurs in many photosynthetic pigment-protein complexes. Using the Fenna–Matthews–Olson antenna complex (FMO) as a model system, theoretical studies incorporating both incoherent and coherent transfer as well as thermal dephasing predict that environmentally assisted quantum transfer efficiency peaks near physiological temperature; these studies also show that this mechanism simultaneously improves the robustness of the energy transfer process. This theory requires long-lived quantum coherence at room temperature, which never has been observed in FMO. Here we present evidence that quantum coherence survives in FMO at physiological temperature for at least 300 fs, long enough to impact biological energy transport. These data prove that the wave-like energy transfer process discovered at 77 K is directly relevant to biological function. Microscopically, we attribute this long coherence lifetime to correlated motions within the protein matrix encapsulating the chromophores, and we find that the degree of protection afforded by the protein appears constant between 77 K and 277 K. The protein shapes the energy landscape and mediates an efficient energy transfer despite thermal fluctuations.

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Citations in the corpus

Control of quantum phenomena: past, present and future (2009, background): “Recent experiments [730]–[734] discovered manifestations of long-lived electronic quantum coherence in energy transfer processes in light-harvesting complexes of photosynthetic systems.”
Theoretical Limits of Photovoltaics Efficiency and Possible Improvements by Intuitive Approaches Learned from Photosynthesis and Quantum Coherence (2014, background): “Long-lasting quantum beating over a time scale of hundreds of femtoseconds has been observed [165, 175].”
Delocalized excitons in natural light-harvesting complexes (2018, background): “Engel and coworkers made further progress, and have reported more detailed experimental results (Hayes and Engel, 2011; Hayes et al., 2010) including the evidence that beating signals can be observed even at room temperature (Panitchayangkoon et al., 2010).”
Modelling of oscillations in two-dimensional echo-spectra of the Fenna–Matthews–Olson complex (2011, methodology): “[6]) suggests that further refinements of the theoretical models are necessary, for example by adjusting the form of the spectral density which affects the population dynamics [38].”
Vibrations, quanta and biology (2013, background): “spectroscopy on various photosynthetic complexes exhibited long-lived oscillatory features which were interpreted as evidence for long-lived electronic coherence in the systems under investigation [11, 13, 14].”