Conformational Dynamics of Small Peptides

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The biological importance of small peptides relates to their activity at receptor sites of many different types. The conformational flexibility of small linear peptides as a function of their environment requires a very accurate understanding of conformational dynamics in order to make predictions by computational methods. This project work will measure the activation energies for conformation changes by time dependent infrared spectroscopic methods. The N-H vibrational motion of peptides is very sensitive to geometric changes and solvent interactions. By experimentally exciting a large temperature jump on a picosecond time scale the peptide conformations rearrange and time dependent experimental measurements of the changes in the N-H region of the infrared over 20 nanoseconds can be related to conformational dynamics. The data will allow testing and refinement of molecular dynamics models. %%% The impact of this work is to enable accurate computational predictions of peptide interactions in a wide variety of biological phenomena. Such accurate predictions are essential to understand structure and function relationships.