Structural analysis of early Eumelanin intermediates and their growth mechanisms

The biological pigment eumelanin protects organisms from harmful UV-radiation and shows highly promising material properties. It forms well defined spherical particles during a 3-step self-assembly process. A biomimetic procedure with appropriate pH-adjustments makes possible to address stable intermediates after all three steps in vitro. However, meaningful light scattering experiments of these species is inhibited due to a high optical density. Therefore, a time resolved SAXS experiment is proposed to investigate the underlying growth mechanism and to analyze size and shape after the first two steps.