Investigation of the Dynamic Mechanism of Reflectin Color Change by QENS

Cephalopods skin has the ability to manipulate incident light with reflective cells to camouflage with their environment. This remarkable capability derives from structurally colored skin cells that form elaborate dielectric structures; a self-assembling protein called reflectin acts as an intracellular high-index material and the extracellular space acts as a low-index materialXie’s research group used a new purification method to obtain a self-assembled two-dimensional classification structure . They found that imidazole molecules interact with reflectin to induce more advanced assembly. However, the structural basis and dynamics remains largely unknown. So the study of reflectin structural function and kinetic characteristics is the focus and target of this research.