Chunyangguang Li, a master’s student in Inoue Group, received IUPAB2024 Student and Early Career Researcher Poster Award.
Chunyangguang Li, a master’s student in Inoue Group, received IUPAB2024 Student and Early Career Researcher Poster Award for his work on “Exploration of the Diversity of Absorption Spectra in Vertebrate Retinal Photo-isomerase, RGR”. The congress was held from June 24 to 28 at the Kyoto International conference center.
He recieved the award with the research about rhodopsins that are involved in the maintenance of visual function in animals. The Retinal G-protein-coupled Recptors, RGRs, of act as light-dependent enzymes to provide 11-cis-retinal, the chromophore of visual rhodopsins. Until now, little research has been done on the spectroscopic properties of RGRs. In this presentation, he and his collegues show that RGRs of many vertebrates are generally blue-absorbing photoreceptors and that zebrafish, a type of bony fish, have a green-absorbing RGR in addition to canonical blue-absorbing RGR. Furthermore, the amino acid residues responsible for the difference in absorption properties between the blue- and green-absorbing RGRs were identified, suggesting that the absorption properties are altered by differences in the torsion of the chromophore retinal. This study is the first to demonstrate the color-tuning mechanism in rhodopsins involved in the maintenance of visual function. The poster presentation on this research was highly evaluated by the participants and the selection committee, leading to the award.