A peptide's perspective of water dynamics

This perspective is focused on amide groups of peptides interacting with water. 2D IR spectroscopy has already enabled structural aspects of the peptide backbone to be determined through its ability to measure the coupling between different amide-I modes. Here we describe why nonlinear IR is emerging as the method of choice to examine the fast components of the water dynamics near peptides and how isotopically edited peptide links can be used to probe the local water at a residue level in proteins. This type of research necessarily involves an intimate mix of theory and experiment. The description of the results is underpinned by relatively well established quantum-statistical theories that describe the important manifestations of peptide vibrational frequency fluctuations. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.