A unified picture of energy and electron transfer in primary photosynthesis

This paper discusses the determination of parameters, in particular the state energies and the free energy surfaces that control the structure-function relationship, and thus the catalytic function of a photosynthetic enzyme. We discuss two different microscopic descriptions, one using conventional non-adiabatic electron transfer theory and the other a supermolecular description of the system (the Multimer Model), which takes into account the electron-phonon coupling in the system in a consistent manner. We demonstrate that although conventional non-adiabatic theory can be employed to reproduce the rates of electron transfer it cannot be employed to provide a consistent and unified description of all the spectroscopic data available in the literature from studies of this enzyme.