Unusual kinetics of thermal decay of dim-light photoreceptors in vertebrate vision.

We present measurements of rate constants for thermal-induced reactions of the 11-cis retinyl chromophore in vertebrate visual pigment rhodopsin, a process that produces noise and limits the sensitivity of vision in dim light. At temperatures of 52.0-64.6 °C, the rate constants fit well to an Arrhenius straight line with, however, an unexpectedly large activation energy of 114 ± 8 kcal/mol, which is much larger than the 60-kcal/mol photoactivation energy at 500 nm. Moreover, we obtain an unprecedentedly large prefactor of 10(72±5) s(-1), which is roughly 60 orders of magnitude larger than typical frequencies of molecular motions! At lower temperatures, the measured Arrhenius parameters become more normal: Ea = 22 ± 2 kcal/mol and Apref = 10(9±1) s(-1) in the range of 37.0-44.5 °C. We present a theoretical framework and supporting calculations that attribute this unusual temperature-dependent kinetics of rhodopsin to a lowering of the reaction barrier at higher temperatures due to entropy-driven partial breakup of the rigid hydrogen-bonding network that hinders the reaction at lower temperatures.