DIPEPTIDE STRUCTURE:
COMPUTATION AND EXPERIMENT
Here’s a nice example of the productive interplay between experiment and
computations.1 The dipeptide N-Acyl-Ala-Ala-Benzyl was prepared and subjected
to UV and IR/UV analysis. The IR showed two separate structures with distinctly
different environments for the NH bonds: one structure showed intramolecular
hydrogen bonding while the other did not.
B97/TZVPP computations revealed two structures. The first is a linear dipeptide
with intramolecular hydrogen bonding occurring in a 5,5 relationship. (There are
actually three conformers of this but all have similar energy, only one is shown in
Figure 1.) The second structure displays a bent shape with a NH-π interaction, also
shown in Figure 1. The computed vibrational spectra for each structure matches up
well with the NH region of the experimental IR.
Figure 1. B97-D/TZVPP optimized structures of N-Acyl-Ala-Ala-Benzyl.
The authors spend a great deal of time noting that the 0 K energies predict that the
second structure, being 4 kcal mol-1 more stable, should be the only one observed.
However, since the jet cooling will likely trap the structures at their 300 K
distribution, this could account for the existence of two structures. However, when
the computations include entropy corrections, so now we’re looking at ΔG(200 K),
B97-D and MO6-2x suggest that the two structures are very close in energy. But
they caution that MP2 predicts a large energy gap unless atomic counterpoise
corrections are used to account for intramolecular basis set superposition (see
this post), a problem that appears to be much less severe with the DFT methods.
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