Clusters of glycolic acid and 16 water molecules

Experimental and theoretical investigation of hydrogen bonded complexes between glycolic acid and water

Theoretical MP2 and B3LYPD3 calculations, as well as experimental matrix isolation infrared spectroscopy studies, were used to investigate the 1:1 complexes formed between glycolic acid and water. Out of five computationally predicted forms of GA⋯H2O complex the most stable one was detected experimentally in solid argon. This structure is characterized by two intermolecular OH⋯O hydrogen bonds depicting a six-member ring in which water acts both as a proton acceptor and as a proton donor. Two other structures with the alcoholic OH group acting as a proton donor are also tentatively suggested to be present in solid argon.

Studies of intramolecular H-bond interactions and solvent effects in the conformers of glycolic acid — A quantum chemical study

In this work, density functional theory is applied to understand the conformational stability and solvent effects on glycolic acid conformers in different solvents. In addition, the role of intramolecular hydrogen bond (H-bond) interactions in the stability of conformers are investigated. The molecular geometries of selected conformers are optimized using B3LYP and PBE0 functionals with 6-311[Formula: see text]G(d,p) basis set. The effects of solvent on the geometrical parameters, relative stability, dipole moment, chemical hardness, chemical potential, etc. are studied for the conformers of glycolic acid. Our calculations show that the order of stability of the SSC and AAT conformers does not change in liquid phase. However, the energy of SSC and AAT conformers is very close to each other in water media. In water media, strong intramolecular H-bond interaction is present in AAT conformer which causes the energy of AAT conformer to be very close to that of SSC conformer. This may be due to the influence of water media.

Comprehensive conformational studies of five tripeptides and a deduced method for efficient determinations of peptide structures

Thorough searches on the potential energy surfaces of five tripeptides, GGG, GYG, GWG, TGG, and MGG, were performed by considering all possible combinations of the bond rotational degrees of freedom with a semiempirical and ab initio combined computational approach. Structural characteristics of the obtained stable tripeptide conformers were carefully analyzed. Conformers of the five tripeptides were found to be closely connected with conformers of their constituting dipeptides and amino acids. A method for finding all important tripeptide conformers by optimizing a small number of trial structures generated by suitable superposition of the parent amino acid and dipeptide conformers is thus proposed. Applying the method to another five tripeptides, YGG, FGG, WGG, GFA, and GGF, studied before shows that the new approach is both efficient and reliable by providing the most complete ensembles of tripeptide conformers. The method is further generalized for application to larger peptides by introducing the breeding and mutation concepts in a genetic algorithm way. The generalized method is verified to be capable of finding tetrapeptide conformers with secondary structures of strands, helices, and turns, which are highly populated in larger peptides. This show some promise for the proposed method to be applied for the structural determination of larger peptides.

Microsolvation of the formic acid dimer — (HCOOH)2(H2O)n clusters with n = 1, . . ., 5

Density functional theory and spin-component-scaled Møller–Plesset perturbation theory calculations are used to examine the microsolvation of the formic acid dimer. The lowest energy structures with n water molecules consist of a n-water cluster, not necessarily of lowest energy, with two formic acid molecules attached to its surface by hydrogen bonds. The total number of hydrogen bonds does not correlate directly with relative stability.