Electron shuttling in electron transfer dissociation

Abstract

Ab initio electronic structure calculations have been performed on two model systems containing a disulfide linkage and one or two positively charged sites, aimed at gaining further insight into how and where electrons attach to positively charged peptides under electron capture (ECD) and electron transfer dissociation (ETD) mass spectroscopy conditions. Couplings among electronic states involving (i) an entrance-channel with the excess electron residing on a donor anion interacting with the positively charged peptide, (ii) a state in which the electron has been transferred to the SS σ* orbital to cause bond cleavage, and (iii) a manifold of states in which the electron has been transferred to a ground- or excited-Rydberg orbital on a positive site. The results of this study suggest that specific excited Rydberg states play a key role in effecting electron shuttling to the SS σ* orbital. The excited-Rydberg orbitals close in energy to the SS σ* orbital and with sufficient radial extent to span the distance between the positive site and the SS σ* orbital play the key role. Then, when the anion donor, excited-Rydberg, and SS σ* orbitals achieve spatial proximity and similarity in energies, one can have what is termed here a shuttle of an electron from the donor to the SS σ* orbital, which results in SS bond cleavage. For the singly and doubly charged systems studied here, it was the 3p and 3d Rydberg orbitals, respectively, that met these criteria of spatial and energetic proximity. For other peptides having different charge states, it will be other Rydberg orbitals that meet these criteria because the relative energies of the SS σ* and Rydberg orbitals are governed by the (different) Coulomb stabilizations these orbitals experience. However, the evidence suggests that it is not very high-energy Rydberg states but states with 3 < n < 10 that are involved in the rate limiting steps in ECD, ETD, and ECID experiments.