The judicious use of a state-of-the-art imaging method enables researchers to capture structural snapshots of complex molecules as they participate in chemical reactions, revealing the sequence of specific atomic motions that lead to chemical change. It’s thought the approach, described in Nature (doi: 10.1038/nature08527), can be used more widely to improve our understanding of important chemical transformations.

Richard Mathies and colleagues at the Univesity of California, Berkeley, USA, demonstrate how far modern imaging capabilities have progressed with green fluorescent protein, GFP — a widely used, jellyfish-derived gene expression marker that shines bright green when exposed to blue light. The team use femtosecond stimulated Raman spectroscopy to probe, on an ultrafast timescale, molecular vibrations that are extremely sensitive to GFP structure and thereby reveal the specific sequence of atomic motions that give rise to the molecule’s bioluminescence.

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