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A metastable state of myoglobin is produced by reduction of metmyoglobin at low temperatures. This is done either by irradiation with x-rays at 80 K or by electron transfer from photoexcited tris(2, 2'-bipyridine)-ruthenium(II) at 20 K. At temperatures above 150 K, the conformational transition toward the equilibrium deoxymyoglobin is observed. X-ray crystallography, Raman spectroscopy, and temperature-dependent optical absorption spectroscopy show that the metastable state has a six-ligated iron low-spin center. The x-ray structure at 115K proves the similarity of the metastable state with metmyoglobin. The Raman spectra yield the high-frequency vibronic modes and give additional information about the distortion of the heme. Analysis of the temperature dependence of the line shape of the Soret band reveals that a relaxation within the metastable state starts at approximately 120 K. Parameters representative of static properties of the intermediate state are close to those of CO-ligated myoglobin, while parameters representative of dynamics are close to deoxymyoglobin. Thus within the metastable state the relaxation to the equilibrium is initiated by changes in the dynamic properties of the active site.

The crystallographic normal mode refinements of myoglobin at a wide range of temperature from 40 K to 300 K were carried out to study the temperature dependence of the internal atomic fluctuations. The refinement method decomposes the mean square displacement from the average position, (deltar2), into the contributions from the internal degrees of freedom and those from the external degrees of freedom. The internal displacements show linear temperature dependence as (deltar2)=alphaT+beta, throughout the temperature range measured here, and exhibit no obvious change in the slope alpha at the dynamical transition temperature (Tc=ca. 180 K). The slope alpha is practically the same as the value predicted theoretically by normal mode analysis. Such linear dependence is considered to be due to the following reason. The crystallographic Debye-Waller factor represents the static distribution caused by convolution of temperature-dependent normal mode motions and a temperature-independent set of the conformational substates. In contrast, Mössbauer absorption spectroscopy shows a clear increase in the gradient alpha at Tc. This difference from X-ray diffraction originates from the incoherent nature of the Mössbauer effect together with its high-energy resolution, which yields the self-correlation, and the temporal behavior of individual Fe atoms in the myoglobin crystal.

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