Research Projects

I. The study of visual proteins and their interaction with chromophoric ligands:

   Figure 1a, below, represents a cartoon of the visual protein rhodopsin (adapted from the X-ray of bovine rhodopsin by Palczewski et al.).  The retinal ligand is covalently linked to Lys296 and its chemical structure details in Figure  1b.

  Current efforts are directed at studying the interactions that the amino acid residue of the binding pocket make with the retinal.  Synthesis and careful design of specific analogs is underway and incubation with opsin followed by detailed spectroscopic analysis will unravel some of the intricate conformational changes occurring during the visual transduction pathway.