Thermodynamics of electron transfer and its coupling to vectorial processes in biological membranes

Abstract

A method is developed to express the flux of an electron transfer reaction as a function of the conjugate force, the redox potential difference, throughout the nonlinear region. The flux can be expressed by a product of the hyperbolic sine of the force, a factor ("redox-poising parameter") determined by the redox potentials of subsystem (in certain cases by local pH's and pK's of subsystems), and some constants. This is analogous to the expression of the flux of a diffusion process by the product of its force and the concentration of the diffusing species. The redox-poising parameter corresponds to the concentration term. The expression is applied to redox chains in which electron transfers are coupled to vectorial processes such as proton translocation or electric current.