Topics in Current Chemistry (vol. 168)

The exchange of an electron from a donor molecule to an acceptor molecule belongs to the most fundamental processes in artificial and natural systems, although, at the primary stage, bonds are neither broken nor formed. However, the transfer of an electron determines the chemical fate of the molecular entities to a great extent. Nature has made use of this principle since the early beginnings of life by converting light energy into chemical energy via charge separation. In recent years man has learnt, e.g. from X-ray analyses performed by Huber, Michel and Deisenhofer, how elaborately the molecular entities are constructed within the supermolecular framework of proteins. The light energy is transferred along cascades of donor and acceptor substrates in order to prevent back electron transfer as an energy wasting step and chemical changes are thus induced in the desired manner.