Massimo Olivucci
Fellowship 2015
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Massimo Olivucci is Professor of Organic Chemistry at the University of Siena, Italy. He also holds a research professorship in Computational Chemistry at the Bowling Green State University, Ohio where he directs the Laboratory for Computational Photochemistry and Photobiology. After his PhD at the University of Bologna (Italy) with Fernando Bernardi and a Postdoc at King’s College London (UK) with Michael Robb he started his independent career at the University of Bologna specializing in theoretical photochemistry. During this stage he played a leading role in establishing that conical intersections between Born-Oppenheimer potential energy surfaces are common mechanistic entities in light-induced organic reactions. At a later stage, his group was one of the first to use multiconfigurational quantum chemistry to construct hybrid quantum mechanics/molecular mechanics models of photoreceptors and fluorescent proteins which allowed the detailed investigations of their spectroscopy, reactivity and dynamics. Such knowledge was shown to be instrumental for achieving a detailed understanding of the photoisomerization mechanism of visual pigments and for directing the design and laboratory synthesis of biomimetic molecular devices. In 2010 he received the Angelo Mangini Gold Medal from the Organic Chemistry Division of the Italian Chemical Society.
Towards the engineering of a fluorescent rhodopsin
Post-doc: Yoelvis Orozco Gonzalez
Rhodopsin proteins in vertebrates, invertebrates and unicellular organisms are amazing demonstrations that light can be exploited by relatively basic molecular machines to carry out vision, ion-pumping, ion-gating and even gene-expression regulation. Such diverse functions are made possible through variations in the environment surrounding the same molecular antenna suggesting that the re-engineering of natural rhodopsins provide a versatile, yet largely unexploited, tool for modern technology. Indeed, a new rhodopsin-based technique, optogenetics, is revolutionizing the field of neurosciences by allowing a beam of light to fire single neurons at precise spatial locations and times. In this context, highly fluorescent rhodopsins, which could be employed as voltage sensors to reveal the firing and transmission of the neural impulses, are eagerly needed. Regrettably, such tools have not been achieved yet. With the present project, we plan to leverage the flexibility of state-of-the-art quantum chemistry to construct, systematically, computer models of rhodopsins capable of simulating their color variability, light response and native fluorescence. Building and studying these models will unveil the mechanisms modulating the relaxation and equilibration of the protein fluorescent state at an atomic level resolution which, in turn, should reveal how to control them by suitable protein sequence mutations. It is hoped that, by integrating these research activities with those present at the Institut de Physique et Chemie du Matériaux de Strasbourg and exploiting the computer facilities at the Mésocentre of the University of Strasbourg, it will be possible to reengineer an eubacterial rhodopsin into an unprecedented optogenetic tool for action potential sensing and visualization.
