Importance of backbone angles versus amino acid configurations in peptide vibrational Raman optical activity spectra

In this work, we investigate whether the differential scattering of right- and left-circularly polarized light in peptide Raman optical activity spectra are uniquely dominated by the backbone conformation, or whether the configurations of the individual amino acid also play a significant role. This is achieved by calculating Raman optical activity spectra using density functional theory for four structurally related peptides with a common backbone conformation, but with different sequences of amino acid configurations. Furthermore, the ROA signals of the amide normal modes are decomposed into contributions from groups of individual atoms. It is found that the amino acid configuration has a considerable influence on the ROA peaks in the amide I, II, and III regions, although the local decomposition reveals that the side-chain atoms only contribute to those peaks directly in the case of the amide II vibrations. Furthermore, small changes in the amide normal modes may lead to large and irregular modifications in the ROA intensity differences, making it difficult to establish transferable ROA intensity differences even for structurally similar vibrations.