Abstract
Disentangling the origin of the optical activity of non-aromatic proteins is challenging due to their size and thus their high computational requisites. Here we show, in a much smaller model system, that the single amino acid glutamine undergoes a chemical transformation leading to an unreported glutamine-like structure which has a similar broad absorption spectrum reported previously for non-aromatic proteins. We further show computationally that the optical activity of the glutamine-like structure is directly coupled to short-hydrogen bonds, but also displays charge and vibrational fluctuations, the latter of which are also present in less optically active structures such as in L-glutamine. Since experimentally the glutamine-like structure is the brightest structure, we conclude that short-hydrogen bonds are the ones responsible for the large Stokes shift observed in optically active non-aromatic proteins.
