Towards understanding the mechanism of fast proton transport in biological systems

The key finding from this work was that we learned how an H+ ion (a proton) can pass along a chain of water molecules that are trapped in the space between four alpha helices. We learned that the mechanism of propagation, while sharing some similarities with bulk water, was otherwise different. We also learned that adding a proton to a chain of water molecules radically changes the behaviour of the molecules in the chain, an effect which is felt over a distance of 10 Angstroms - amazing considering the diameter of a single proton is around 100,000 times smaller than this!