Vibrational Raman optical activity of polynucleotides

Bell, A.F., Hecht, L. and Barron, L.D. (1997) Vibrational Raman optical activity of polynucleotides. In: Carmona, P., Navarro, R. and Hernanz, A. (eds.) Spectroscopy of Biological Molecules: Modern Trends. Springer Netherlands, pp. 245-246. ISBN 9789401063692 (doi: 10.1007/978-94-011-5622-6_109)

Abstract

Vibrational Raman optical activity (ROA) is measured in our laboratory as a small intensity difference in Raman scattered light from chiral molecules in right and left circularly polarized incident light.[l, 2] Recently, a series of instrumental advances [3] has opened up the realm of biopolymers, including proteins, polysaccharides and now nucleic acids, to this novel chiroptical technique. For proteins and polysaccharides it has already been demonstrated that ROA can probe key structural elements more incisively than conventional Raman spectroscopy because it can cut through the complexity of the conventional spectra by probing directly the crucial chiral elements of biomolecular structure. In this contribution we focus on some of our recent results on polynucleotides and as an example present the Raman and ROA spectra of poly(rG)•poly(rC) in H2O between 650 and 1750 cm −1 in Figure 1.

• Item Type: Book Sections
• Status: Published
• Glasgow Author(s) Enlighten ID: Hecht, Dr Lutz and Barron, Professor Laurence
• Authors: Bell, A.F., Hecht, L., and Barron, L.D.
• College/School: College of Science and Engineering > School of Chemistry
• Publisher: Springer Netherlands
• ISBN: 9789401063692