ELECTRONIC SPECTROSCOPY OF SIMPLE PORPHYRINS

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The research described here is a continuation and extension of work being carried out under our current MBRS grant. This is primarily a study of simple, unsubstituted porphyrins in the solid state at 5K with respect to their electronic ground and excited state proteins using site excitation, optical hole-burning and the Stark effect. The fundamental hypothesis of this research is that excited states of porphyrins are more complex than is currently recognized. Porphyrins have been actively studied for years, but most of the spectroscopic data is from room temperature solutions which yield broad bands. Our approach is to place the molecules in n-alkane host crystals or low temperature glasses at liquid helium temperatures. High resolution (approximately 2 cm/-1) spectra can be obtained using single sit excitation or optical hole-burning. When the narrow bands of single site spectra, or optical holes are coupled with the Stark effect, they provide a sensitive probe of molecule's electronic states. We plan to continue to study free base and metal complex forms of these simple molecules (e.g. porphin, chlorin, isobacteriochlorin); they are parent compounds of biomedically important moieties (e.g. hemes, chlorophylls). Of particular interest now in the electronic structure of the simple porphyrins, is that we have found evidence for vibronic coupling between the first and second excited states and for the presence of low energy pi*- n transitions. Both of these observations will be studied further with Stark effect experiments. However, now we will also begin to use our expertise in obtaining high resolution electronic spectra, and the detailed spectral information which we previously obtained on simple prophyrins, to examine the electronic states of biomedically active porphyrin based moieties. Because of our extensive experience with isobacteriochlorin we will start this initiative with sulfite reductase; this enzyme is characterized by the presence of an iron siroheme (iron isobacteriochlorin) exchanged coupled to a Fe4S4 cluster. The primary, long-term objective of this project is to extract detailed ground and excited state information (e.g. vibrational energies, dipole moments, pi/pi* and npi* origin energies, coupling, etc.) from biomedically important porphyrin chromophores and understand their electronic structure.