Understanding beliefs, preferences and actions amongst potential body donors.

Body donation is a prosocial act providing a unique learning experience to students, ultimately impacting on patient care and science. With an increasing number of training professionals, there is an increasing need for body donors, yet little is understood about donors' beliefs and preferences. A four-center study aimed to understand donors' perceptions, 843 responses highlighted a significant relationship between completing a body donor consent form and being both an organ donor and having ever donated blood (p < 0.

On the arrangement of chromophores in light harvesting complexes: chance versus design.

We used a homogeneous computational approach to derive the excitonic Hamiltonian for five light harvesting complexes containing only one type of chromophore and compare them in terms of statistical descriptors. We then studied the approximate exciton dynamics for the five complexes introducing a measure, the (averaged and time-dependent) inverse participation ratio, that enables the comparison between very diverse complexes on the same ground. We find that the global dynamics are very similar across the set of systems despite the variety of geometric structures of the complexes.

Developing Consistent Molecular Dynamics Force Fields for Biological Chromophores via Force Matching.

The role of the environment in excitation energy transport in the pigment-protein complexes (PPCs) of photosynthetic organisms is a widely investigated topic. The spectral density is a key component in understanding this protein-pigment interaction; however, the typical approach for calculating spectral density, combining molecular dynamics with quantum chemistry (QC) calculations, suffers from the geometry mismatch problem, arising from the structural inconsistency between the force field (FF) and the QC calculation. Existing parameterization methods demand much time-consuming manual inputs, limiting the number of systems that can be studied.

How fine-tuned for energy transfer is the environmental noise produced by proteins around biological chromophores?

We investigate the role of the local protein environment on the energy transfer processes in biological molecules, excluding from the analysis the effect of intra-chromophore nuclear motions, and focussing on the exciton-phonon coupling. We studied three different proteins (FMO and two variants of the WSCP protein) with different biological functions but similar chromophores, to understand whether a classification of chromophores based on the details of the environment would be possible, and whether specific environments enhance or suppress the coupling between exciton and protein dynamics. Our results show that despite the different biological role, there is no significant difference in the influence of the environment on the properties of the chromophores.

Chromophore-Dependent Intramolecular Exciton-Vibrational Coupling in the FMO Complex: Quantification and Importance for Exciton Dynamics.

In this paper, we adopt an approach suitable for monitoring the time evolution of the intramolecular contribution to the spectral density of a set of identical chromophores embedded in their respective environments. We apply the proposed method to the Fenna-Matthews-Olson (FMO) complex, with the objective to quantify the differences among site-dependent spectral densities and the impact of such differences on the exciton dynamics of the system. Our approach takes advantage of the vertical gradient approximation to reduce the computational demands of the normal modes analysis.