Observation of dielectric universalities in albumin, cytochrome C and Shewanella oneidensis MR-1 extracellular matrix

• Published in: Scientific reports Vol. 7; no. 1; pp. 15731 - 11
• Main Authors: Motovilov, K. A., Savinov, M., Zhukova, E. S., Pronin, A. A., Gagkaeva, Z. V., Grinenko, V., Sidoruk, K. V., Voeikova, T. A., Barzilovich, P. Yu, Grebenko, A. K., Lisovskii, S. V., Torgashev, V. I., Bednyakov, P., Pokorný, J., Dressel, M., Gorshunov, B. P.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: London Nature Publishing Group UK 16-11-2017; Nature Publishing Group
• Subjects: 639/301/54/1754; 639/301/923/1028; 639/624/399/54/1754; Albumin; Albumins - metabolism; Animals; Cattle; Condensed matter physics; Conductivity; Cytochrome; Cytochrome c; Cytochromes c - metabolism; Electric Conductivity; Electricity; Extracellular matrix; Extracellular Matrix - metabolism; Frequency dependence; Humanities and Social Sciences; Low temperature; Metals; multidisciplinary; Physics; Science; Science (multidisciplinary); Shewanella - metabolism; Spectrum Analysis; Temperature; Water - chemistry
• ISSN: 2045-2322; 2045-2322
• DOI: 10.1038/s41598-017-15693-y

The electrodynamics of metals is well understood within the Drude conductivity model; properties of insulators and semiconductors are governed by a gap in the electronic states. But there is a great variety of disordered materials that do not fall in these categories and still respond to external field in an amazingly uniform manner. At radiofrequencies delocalized charges yield a frequency-independent conductivity
σ
1
(
ν
) whose magnitude exponentially decreases while cooling. With increasing frequency, dispersionless conductivity starts to reveal a power-law dependence
σ
1
(
ν
)∝
ν
s
with
s
 < 1 caused by hopping charge carriers. At low temperatures, such Universal Dielectric Response can cross over to another universal regime with nearly constant loss ε″∝σ
1
/ν = const. The powerful research potential based on such universalities is widely used in condensed matter physics. Here we study the broad-band (1–10
12
 Hz) dielectric response of
Shewanella oneidensis
MR-1 extracellular matrix, cytochrome C and serum albumin. Applying concepts of condensed matter physics, we identify transport mechanisms and a number of energy, time, frequency, spatial and temperature scales in these biological objects, which can provide us with deeper insight into the protein dynamics.