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Modification of Enzyme Activity by Vibrational Strong Coupling of Water
Author(s) -
Vergauwe Robrecht M. A.,
Thomas Anoop,
Nagarajan Kalaivanan,
Shalabney Atef,
George Jino,
Chervy Thibault,
Seidel Marcus,
Devaux Eloïse,
Torbeev Vladimir,
Ebbesen Thomas W.
Publication year - 2019
Publication title -
angewandte chemie
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
eISSN - 1521-3757
pISSN - 0044-8249
DOI - 10.1002/ange.201908876
Subject(s) - chemistry , coupling (piping) , reactivity (psychology) , molecule , rotational–vibrational coupling , molecular vibration , chemical physics , absorption (acoustics) , computational chemistry , molecular physics , materials science , optics , physics , organic chemistry , medicine , alternative medicine , pathology , metallurgy
Vibrational strong coupling (VSC) has recently emerged as a completely new tool for influencing chemical reactivity. It harnesses electromagnetic vacuum fluctuations through the creation of hybrid states of light and matter, called polaritonic states, in an optical cavity resonant to a molecular absorption band. Here, we investigate the effect of vibrational strong coupling of water on the enzymatic activity of pepsin, where a water molecule is directly involved in the enzyme's chemical mechanism. We observe an approximately 4.5‐fold decrease of the apparent second‐order rate constant k cat / K m when coupling the water stretching vibration, whereas no effect was detected for the strong coupling of the bending vibration. The possibility of modifying enzymatic activity by coupling water demonstrates the potential of VSC as a new tool to study biochemical reactivity.