Raman optical activity of tetra-alanine in the poly(l-proline) II type peptide conformation.

The poly(l-proline) II (PPII) helix is considered to be a major conformation in disordered polypeptides and unfolded proteins in aqueous solution. The PPII conformation can be identified by using Raman optical activity (ROA), which measures the different intensities of right- and left-circularly polarized Raman scattered light from chiral molecules and provides information on stereochemistry associated with vibrational motions. In the present study, we used tetra-alanine (Ala4) as a model system, since its central amide bond adopts the PPII conformation. The predominance of the PPII conformation was supported by 11 ns molecular dynamics (MD) simulations at 300 K. The MD snapshots were used for subsequent quantum mechanical/molecular mechanical (QM/MM) calculations to compute the Raman and ROA spectra. The present MD + QM/MM analysis leads to a good agreement between the observed and simulated spectra, allowing us to assign most of the spectral features including the ROA band near 1320 cm-1, which has been used as a marker for the PPII conformation. This positive ROA band has three components. The lower frequency component near 1310 cm-1 arises from an internal peptide bond, whereas the higher frequency components around 1320-1335 cm-1 appear due to N- and C-terminal peptide groups. The MD + QM/MM calculations also reproduced the electronic circular dichroism spectra of Ala4. The present results provide a satisfactory framework for future investigations of unfolded/disordered proteins as well as peptides in solutions by chiral spectroscopic methods.

Raman optical activity of a cyclic dipeptide analyzed by quantum chemical calculations combined with molecular dynamics simulations.

Raman optical activity (ROA) measures the different intensity of right- and left-circularly polarized Raman scattered light and provides information on chirality associated with vibrational modes. Because of a high sensitivity to subtle structural and environmental changes, interpretations of ROA spectra usually rely on quantum chemical simulations. Recent advances in computational chemistry allow us to consider explicit solvent models that are derived from molecular dynamics (MD) simulations to compute the Raman and ROA spectra. An important concern for the explicit solvent models is the number of MD snapshots that lead to a good agreement between the observed and calculated spectra. In the present study, we measured the Raman and ROA spectra of cyclo(L-Ala-Gly) and then simulated the spectra using density functional theory combined with MD simulations. Although cyclo(L-Ala-Gly) is a relatively rigid cyclic molecule, boat-up and boat-down conformations were found from the MD calculations. Because the Raman spectra of the two conformations are similar except for a lower frequency region, ∼10 MD snapshots are capable of reproducing the main features of the observed Raman spectra. In contrast, a larger number of MD snapshots was required to reproduce the ROA spectra. In the middle freqency region of 800-1580 cm(-1), an average of ∼40 spectra led to good agreement between the observed and calculated spectra. On the other hand, the low (0-800 cm(-1)) and high (1580-1800 cm(-1)) frequency regions require more than 60 and 120 MD snapshots, respectively. The Raman and ROA spectra in the low frequency region are relatively broad, and such spectral features require a larger number of averaged spectra. The high frequency region of the spectra consists of an amide I band, which is primarily a C═O stretching vibration. Since both the ROA intensity and frequency of the amide I band are highly sensitive to structural and environmental differences, a large number of the spectra need to be averaged to reproduce the small negative features in the observed ROA spectra.