Core-level electronic structure of solid-phase glycine, glycyl-glycine, diglycyl-glycine, and polyglycine: X-ray photoemission analysis and Hartree-Fock calculations of their zwitterions.

X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) has been used to investigate the core-level electronic structures of glycine (G) and its peptides, including glycyl-glycine (GG), diglycyl-glycine (GGG), and polyglycine (poly-G), in their powder forms. Increasing the number of G units in the peptides does not change the locations of the respective C 1s, N 1s, and O 1s features corresponding to different functional groups: -COO(-), -NH(3)(+), >CH(2), and -CONH-. The electronic structures of the zwitterions of these molecules have been calculated as isolated molecules and as molecules in an aqueous environment under the periodic boundary conditions by quantum-mechanical and molecular mechanics methods. In the case of glycine zwitterion, the binding energies of the C 1s, N 1s, and O 1s XPS features are found to be in reasonable accord with the respective orbital energies obtained by Hartree-Fock self-consistent-field calculations, within the context of Koopmans' approximation. However, considerably worse agreement in the binding energies is found for the larger zwitterions (with the specific conformations considered in this work), indicating the need for higher-level calculations. The present work shows that optimizing the zwitterion in an aqueous environment under the periodic boundary conditions by molecular mechanics could be a very cost-effective approach for calculating the electronic structures of large, complex biomolecular systems.