Scientists design superfast molecular motor

Light-driven molecular motors have been around for over 20 years. These motors typically take microseconds to nanoseconds for one revolution. Thomas Jansen, associate professor of physics at the University of Groningen, and ...

Tethered chem combos could revolutionize artificial photosynthesis

Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory have doubled the efficiency of a chemical combo that captures light and splits water molecules so the building blocks can be used to produce hydrogen ...

Light-induced changes in photosensory proteins

Researchers from Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin have demonstrated on a molecular level how a specific protein allows light signals to be converted into cellular information. Their findings have broadened the understanding ...

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Chromophore

A chromophore is the part of a molecule responsible for its color. The color arises when a molecule absorbs certain wavelengths of visible light and transmits or reflects others. The chromophore is a region in the molecule where the energy difference between two different molecular orbitals falls within the range of the visible spectrum. Visible light that hits the chromophore can thus be absorbed by exciting an electron from its ground state into an excited state.

In biology, molecules that serve to capture or detect light energy, the chromophore is the moiety that causes a conformational change of the molecule when hit by light.

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