Small has published a collaborative paper by Prof. Agnieszka Kaczor of the Chiroptical Spectroscopy Group, dr. Grzegorz Zając, Prof. Paweł Wydro, and coworkers, entitled " Organization of Carotenoid Aggregates in Membranes Studied Selectively using Resonance Raman Optical Activity".
This paper describes the application of the Resonance Raman Optical Activity (RROA) method to analyze the organization of carotenoids in liposomes. It is demonstrated that the RROA technique provides selective information about carotenoid aggregates against monomers. Experimental RROA spectra, supported by calculations using molecular dynamics and quantum chemical methods, contain rich data on the organization of carotenoid molecules in the formed aggregates, their orientation in liposomes, and their stability. In particular, polyene chain bending was found to be an important feature of J-aggregates of α-carotene, which exhibits increased orientation freedom and stability inside liposomes compared to H-aggregates of more polar xanthophylls (zeaxanthin and fucoxanthin). Overall, the published work opens new perspectives for using the RROA technique to study active compounds in cell membranes.
The research was supported with a project funded by the National Science Center under the OPUS19 program (project no. 2020/37/B/ST4/01168).
Congratulations to the authors!
According to the list of scientific journals and peer-reviewed materials of international conferences of the Ministry of Education and Science, the number of points assigned to Small is 200 (Impact Factor = 13.3)
