Single-shot electronic optical activity interferometry: power and phase fluctuation-free measurement

We demonstrate that a single-pulse characterization of electronic optical activity-free induction decay, which carries information on both circular dichroism and optical rotatory dispersion, is experimentally feasible. Employing a self-referencing scheme, we show that a highly reliable interferometric chiroptical measurement free from power and phase fluctuations is achievable on a shot-by-shot basis.

Vibrational spectroscopic determination of local solvent electric field, solute-solvent electrostatic interaction energy, and their fluctuation amplitudes

IR probes have been extensively used to monitor local electrostatic and solvation dynamics. Particularly, their vibrational frequencies are highly sensitive to local solvent electric field around an IR probe. Here, we show that the experimentally measured vibrational frequency shifts can be inversely used to determine local electric potential distribution and solute-solvent electrostatic interaction energy. In addition, the upper limits of their fluctuation amplitudes are estimated by using the vibrational bandwidths. Applying this method to fully deuterated N-methylacetamide (NMA) in D(2)O and examining the solvatochromic effects on the amide I' and II' mode frequencies, we found that the solvent electric potential difference between O(═C) and D(-N) atoms of the peptide bond is about 5.4 V, and thus, the approximate solvent electric field produced by surrounding water molecules on the NMA is 172 MV/cm on average if the molecular geometry is taken into account. The solute-solvent electrostatic interaction energy is estimated to be -137 kJ/mol, by considering electric dipole-electric field interaction. Furthermore, their root-mean-square fluctuation amplitudes are as large as 1.6 V, 52 MV/cm, and 41 kJ/mol, respectively. We found that the water electric potential on a peptide bond is spatially nonhomogeneous and that the fluctuation in the electrostatic peptide-water interaction energy is about 10 times larger than the thermal energy at room temperature. This indicates that the peptide-solvent interactions are indeed important for the activation of chemical reactions in aqueous solution.

Redistribution of carbonyl stretch mode energy in isolated and solvated N-methylacetamide: kinetic energy spectral density analyses

The vibrational energy transfer from the excited carbonyl stretch mode in N-deuterated N-methylacetamide (NMA-d), both in isolation and in a heavy water cluster, is studied with nonequilibrium molecular dynamics (NEMD) simulations, employing a quantum mechanical/molecular mechanical (QM∕MM) force field at the semiempirical PM3 level. The nonequilibrium ensemble of vibrationally excited NMA-d is prepared by perturbing the positions and velocities of the carbonyl C and O atoms and its NEMD trajectories are obtained with a leap-frog algorithm properly modified for the initial perturbation. In addition to the time-domain analysis of the kinetic and potential energies, a novel method for the spectral analysis of the atomic kinetic energies is developed, in terms of the spectral density of kinetic energy, which provides the time-dependent changes of the frequency-resolved kinetic energies without the complications of normal mode analysis at every MD time step. Due to the QM description of the solute electronic structure, the couplings among the normal modes are captured more realistically than with classical force fields. The energy transfer in the isolated NMA-d is found to proceed first from the carbonyl bond to other modes with time scales of 3 ps or less, and then among the other modes over 3-21 ps. In the solvated NMA-d, most of the excess energy is first transferred to other intramolecular modes within 5 ps, which is subsequently dissipated to solvent with 7-19 ps time scales. The contribution of the direct energy transfer from the carbonyl bond to solvent was only 5% with ~7 ps time scale. Solvent reorganization that leads to destabilization of the electrostatic interactions is found to be crucial in the long time relaxation of the excess energy, while the water intramolecular modes do not contribute significantly. Detailed mode-specific energy transfer pathways are deduced for the isolated and solvated NMA-d and they show that the energy transfer in NMA-d is a highly cooperative process among the intramolecular modes and there is no single dominant pathway with more than 30% of transient contribution.

Azido Homoalanine is a Useful Infrared Probe for Monitoring Local Electrostatistics and Sidechain Solvation in Proteins

The use of IR probes to monitor protein structure, deduce local electric field, and investigate the mechanism of enzyme catalysis and protein folding has attracted increasing attention. Here, the azidohomoalanine (Aha) is considered as a useful IR probe. The intricate details of the distinct effects of backbone peptide bonds and H-bonded water molecules on the azido stretch mode of the IR probe Aha were revealed by carrying out QM/MM MD simulations of two variants of the protein NTL9, NTL9-Met1Aha and NTL9-Ile4Aha and comparing the resulting simulated IR spectra with experiments.

Phosphorylation alters backbone conformational preferences of serine and threonine peptides

Despite the notion that a control of protein function by phosphorylation works mainly by inducing its conformational changes, the phosphorylation effects on even small peptide conformation have not been fully understood yet. To study its possible effects on serine and threonine peptide conformations, we recently carried out pH- and temperature-dependent circular dichroism (CD) as well as (1)H NMR studies of the phosphorylated serine and threonine peptides and compared them with their unphosphorylated analogs. In the present article, by performing the self-consistent singular value decomposition analysis of the temperature-dependent CD spectra and by analyzing the (3)J(H(N),H(α)) coupling constants extracted from the NMR spectra, the populations of the polyproline II (PPII) and β-strand conformers of the phosphorylated Ser and Thr peptides are determined. As temperature is increased, the β-strand populations of both phosphorylated serine and threonine peptides increase. However, the dependences of PPII/β-strand population ratio on pH are different for these two cases. The phosphorylation of the serine peptide enhances the PPII propensity, whereas that of the threonine peptide has the opposite effect. This suggests that the serine and threonine phosphorylations can alter the backbone conformational propensity via direct but selective intramolecular hydrogen-bonding interactions with the peptide N--H groups. This clearly indicates that the phosphoryl group actively participates in modulating the peptide backbone conformations.

Broadband near UV to visible optical activity measurement using self-heterodyned method

We demonstrate that broadband electronic optical activity can be measured with supercontinuum light pulse generated by a femtosecond pump (800 nm). It is the self-heterodyned detection technique that enables us to selectively measure the real (optical rotatory dispersion, ORD) or imaginary (circular dichroism, CD) part of the chiroptical susceptibility by controlling the incident polarization state. The single-shot-based measurement that is capable of correcting power fluctuations of the continuum light is realized by using a fast CCD detector and a polarizing beam splitter. Particularly, non-differential scheme used does not rely on any polarization-switching components. We anticipate that this broadband CD/ORD spectrometry with intrinsically ultrafast time-resolution will be applied to a variety of ultrafast chiroptical dynamics studies.

Effect of filler geometry on coefficient of thermal expansion in carbon nanofiber reinforced epoxy composites

This study involves the investigation of the geometry effect of nano-fillers on thermally induced dimensional stability of epoxy composites by experimentally evaluating the linear coefficient of thermal expansion (CTE). Carbon nanofibers (CNF) were chosen as the filler in epoxy matrix to investigate the effect of an aspect ratio on the CTE of the nanocomposites at three different volume fractions of 0.5, 1, and 2% of the nano-filler. The composites were fabricated using a mechanical mixing method. The CTE values were evaluated by measuring thermal strains of the composites and also compared with a micromechanics model. It was observed that the composites with short CNF (average L/d = 10) show better thermal stability than one of the composites with long CNF (average L/d = 70), and the thermal stability of the composites was proportional to the volume fraction of the filler in each composite. In addition, the CTE of mutliwalled carbon nanotubes (MWNT) reinforced epoxy composites was evaluated and compared with the CTE of the CNF reinforced composites. Interestingly, the MWNT reinforced composites show the greatest thermal stability with an 11.5% reduction in the CTE over the pure epoxy. The experimental data was compared with micromechanics model.