The results of a theoretical study of the dynamic self-organization phenomenon in the photosynthetic reaction center (RC) from purple bacteria are presented accounting for the stochastic effects an RC ensembles. The adiabatic approximation is applied to determine the specific role of slow structural (protein/cofactors) modes in the correlated behavior of the electronic and structural variables. It is shown that, at certain values of light intensity, the system undergoes bifurcation. The bistability region for the generalized structural variable occurs where the system has two stable states, one characteristic for the dark-adapted sample (i.e., the sample under very low illumination intensity) and the other for the light-adapted sample. The description is based on the solution of the “forward” Kolmogorov equations using the Markov approach. A distribution function describing the probability of finding the electron localized on a particular cofactor with a certain value of the generalized structural variable is used. Modeling shows a good agreement with the results of experimental investigations of transient optical absorbance changes of the isolated RCs from the purple bacterium Rhodobacter sphaeroides. The results indicate that the free energy difference between QA - and QB - changes substantially in different conformational states of the protein/cofactors induced by light over a wide range of the illuminating light intensity.
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