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The rise of quantum information science has spurred chemists to prepare new molecules that serve as useful building blocks in quantum technologies of the future. Implementation of molecular spin-based qubits requires new methods to induce high spin polarization of samples. Herein, we report design criteria to develop axially symmetric spin-1/2 molecules amenable to optically induced magnetization (OIM), a technique using circularly polarized (CP) excitation to deliver spin polarization. We apply these criteria to develop a series of tungsten(V) chalcogenide complexes that are demonstrated to have large spin-sensitive responses to CP light using magnetic circular dichroism (MCD) that could allow up to ∼20% spin polarization through OIM. Pulsed electron paramagnetic resonance (EPR) spectra reveal these systems have improved relaxation times over molecules like K2IrCl6, a species recently investigated by OIM, and field-swept electron spin−echo (FS-ESE) experiments show they have a remarkable lack of anisotropy in their phase-memory Tm times. The design criteria are general and point toward future ways to improve OIMinitializable qubits. 

In‐cell measurements of the relationship between structure and dynamics to protein function is at the forefront of biophysics. Recently, developments in EPR methodology have demonstrated the sensitivity and power of this method to measure structural constraints in‐cell. However, the need to spin label proteins ex‐situ or use noncanonical amino acids to achieve endogenous labeling remains a bottleneck. In this work we expand the methodology to endogenously spin label proteins with Cu(II) spin labels and describe how to assess in‐cell spin labeling. We quantify the amount of Cu(II)‐NTA in cells, assess spin labeling, and account for orientational effects during distance measurements. We compare the efficacy of using heat‐shock and hypotonic swelling to deliver spin label, showing that hypotonic swelling is a facile and reproducible method to efficiently deliver Cu(II)‐NTA into E. coli. Notably, over six repeats we accomplish a bulk average of 57 μM spin labeled sites, surpassing existing endogenous labeling methods. The results of this work open the door for endogenous spin labeling that is easily accessible to the broader biophysical community. 

Bacteria use specialized proteins, like transcription factors, to rapidly control metal ion balance. CueR is a Gram‐negative bacterial copper regulator. The structure ofE. coliCueR complexed with Cu(I) and DNA was published, since then many studies have shed light on its function. However,P. aeruginosaCueR, which shows high sequence similarity toE. coliCueR, has been less studied. Here, we applied room‐temperature electron paramagnetic resonance (EPR) measurements to explore changes in dynamics ofP. aeruginosaCueR in dependency of copper concentrations and interaction with two different DNA promoter regions. We showed thatP. aeruginosaCueR is less dynamic than theE. coliCueR protein and exhibits much higher sensitivity to DNA binding as compared to itsE. coliCueR homolog. Moreover, a difference in dynamical behavior was observed whenP. aeruginosaCueR binds to thecopZ2DNA promoter sequence compared to themexPQ‐opmEpromoter sequence. Such dynamical differences may affect the expression levels of CopZ2 and MexPQ‐OpmE proteins inP. aeruginosa. Overall, such comparative measurements of protein‐DNA complexes derived from different bacterial systems reveal insights about how structural and dynamical differences between two highly homologous proteins lead to quite different DNA sequence‐recognition and mechanistic properties. 

Herein, we develop an efficient rotamer library-based approach to predict distance distributions from Cu(ii) protein labels. 

Combining rigid Cu( ii ) labels and pulsed-EPR techniques enables distance constraint measurements that are incisive probes of protein structure and dynamics. However, the labels can lead to a dipolar signal that is biased by the relative orientation of the two spins, which is typically unknown a priori in a bilabeled protein. This effect, dubbed orientational selectivity, becomes a bottleneck in measuring distances. This phenomenon also applies to other pulsed-EPR techniques that probe electron–nucleus interactions. In this work, we dissect orientational selectivity by generating an in silico sample of Cu( ii )-labeled proteins to evaluate pulse excitation in the context of double electron–electron resonance (DEER) at Q-band frequencies. This approach enables the observation of the contribution of each protein orientation to the dipolar signal, which provides direct insights into optimizing acquisition schemes to mitigate orientational effects. Furthermore, we incorporate the excitation profile of realistic pulses to identify the excited spins. With this method, we show that rectangular pulses, despite their imperfect inversion capability, can sample similar spin orientations as other sophisticated pulses with the same bandwidth. Additionally, we reveal that the efficiency of exciting spin-pairs in DEER depends on the frequency offset of two pulses used in the experiment and the relative orientation of the two spins. Therefore, we systematically examine the frequency offset of the two pulses used in this double resonance experiment to determine the optimal frequency offset for optimal distance measurements. This procedure leads to a protocol where two measurements are sufficient to acquire orientational-independent DEER at Q-band. Notably, this procedure is feasible with any commercial pulsed-EPR spectrometer. Furthermore, we experimentally validate the computational results using DEER experiments on two different proteins. Finally, we show that increasing the amplitude of the rectangular pulse can increase the efficiency of DEER experiments by almost threefold. Overall, this work provides an attractive new approach for analyzing pulsed-EPR spectroscopy to obtain microscopic nuances that cannot be easily discerned from analytical or numerical calculations.