Dallas Bell will be presenting: Deconvolution Tools for Extracting Insight from Challenging Two-Flavin Systems

Abstract: Flavoproteins have long been explored for their ubiquity among a number of metabolic and energetic reactions. The flavin cofactor has the inherent benefit of distinct spectral changes associated with redox transitions; however, the double-edged sword is incurred as these distinct signatures overlap and take up much of the UV-vis spectral range. Therefore, it is crucial to create a method to demarcate the expressed redox transitions for studying these systems. The first portion of these studies discusses the creation of a program that deduces spectra for redox transitions in a single-flavin containing model protein: flavodoxin. The latter portions discuss the application of the program in a much more challenging diflavin system (R.pal ETF) for a variety of experiments, including a flavin modification, separating spectral contributions from individual flavins, and studying a spectral feature, possibly in consequence to a conformational change. Together, these express the ability for the program to gain insight from a variety of experiments.