Dissecting amide-I vibration in β-peptide helices.

The vibrational properties of the amide-I modes of β-peptides in five helical conformations (8-helix, 10-helix, 12-helix, 14-helix, and 10/12-helix) from tetramer to heptamer were examined by ab initio calculations. The normal modes have been first decoupled into local modes, whose transition energies are found to be intrinsically sensitive to peptide structure and intramolecular hydrogen bonding interactions. By further removing the intramolecular hydrogen bonding interactions, pure local modes are obtained, whose transition energies still exhibit some conformational dependence in 8-helix and 10/12 hybrid helix, but not much in homogeneous 10-, 12-, and 14-helical conformations. This suggests that a set of nearly degenerated pure local-mode transitions can be specified when excitonic modeling the amide-I vibration in latter cases. The work provides important benchmark measurements for understanding the complexity of the amide-I absorption spectra of β-polypeptides.