Electronic circular dichroism of fluorescent proteins: a computational study.

The electronic circular dichroism (ECD) properties of the green fluorescent protein and other fluorescent proteins have been calculated with density functional theory. The influence of different embedding models on the ECD signal of the chromophore has been investigated by modeling the protein environment by the polarizable continuum model (QM/PCM), by the polarizable embedding model (PE-QM/MM), by treating the minimal environment quantum mechanically at the same footing as the chromophore (QM/QM), and by adding the remaining part of the protein by means of PCM (QM/QM/PCM). The rotatory strength is found to be more sensitive than the oscillatory strength to changes in the geometry of the chromophore and its surroundings and to the type of embedding model used.

Circular dichroism and optical rotation of lactamide and 2-aminopropanol in aqueous solution.

The performance of implicit and explicit solvent models (polarizable continuum model (PCM) and microsolvation with positions of water molecules obtained either from molecular dynamics (MD) simulations or quantum mechanical geometry optimization) for calculations of electronic circular dichroism (CD) and optical rotation (OR) is examined for two polar and flexible molecules: lactamide and 2-aminopropanol. The vibrational structure of the CD spectrum is modeled for lactamide. The results are compared with the newly obtained experimental data.

Theoretical prediction of the spin-spin coupling constants between an axis and macrocycle of a rotaxane.

The indirect nuclear spin-spin coupling constants between nuclei belonging to the axis and to the macrocycle of three structurally related rotaxanes have been calculated by means of density functional theory. It has been shown that the through-space axis-macrocycle proton-proton coupling constants can be as large as 0.4-0.