1. Theoretical Investigations of the Chiral Transition of α-Amino Acid Confined in Various Sized Armchair Boron-Nitride Nanotubes.
- Author
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Zuocheng Wang, Yan Fang Liu, Honyan Yan, Hua Tong, and Zemin Mei
- Subjects
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BORON nitride , *CHIRALITY , *AMINO acids , *NANOTUBES , *ENANTIOMERS , *CHEMICAL reactions , *RATE determining steps (Chemistry) - Abstract
We computationally study the chiral transition process of the α-Ala molecule under confined different sizes of armchair SWBNNTs to explore the confinement effect. We find that the influence of a confinement environment (in armchair SWBNNTs) on the α-Ala molecule would lead to different reaction pathways. Meanwhile, the preferred reaction pathway is also different in various sizes of armchair SWBNNTs, and their energy barriers for the rate-limiting step decrease rapidly with the decreasing of the diameters of the nanotubes. It is obvious that significant decrease of the chiral transition energy barrier occurs compared with the isolated α-Ala molecule chirality conversion mechanism, by ∼15.6 kcal mol-1, highlighting the improvement in the activity the enantiomers of α-Ala molecule. We concluded that the confinement environment has a significant impact at the nanoscale on the enantiomer transformation process of the chiral molecule. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2017
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