Hydrogen-bonding studies of amino acid side-chains with DNA base pairs

Abstract

The interactions of the amino acid side-chains arginine (ARG), aspartic acid (ASP), asparagine (ASN), lysine (LYS) and serine (SER) with nucleic acid base pairs have been investigated using theoretical methods. The interaction energy of the short intermolecular N–H ··· N, N–H ··· O, O–H ··· O, O–H ··· N, C–H ··· O and C–H ··· N hydrogen bonds present in both isolated base pairs and complexes and its role in providing stability to the complexes have been explored. The homonuclear interactions are found to be stronger than the heteronuclear interactions. An improper hydrogen bond has been observed for some of the N–H ··· O and N–H ··· N hydrogen-bond interactions with the contraction of the N–H bond varying from 0.001 to 0.0260 Å and the corresponding blue shift of the stretching frequency by 4–291 cm−1. Localized molecular orbital energy decomposition analysis (LMOEDA) reveals that the major contributions to the energetics are from the long-range polarization (PL) interaction, and the short-range attractive (ES, EX) and repulsive (REP) interactions. The Bader's atoms in molecules (AIM) theory shows good correlation for the electron density and its Laplacian at the bond critical points (BCP) with the N–H ··· N and N–H ··· O hydrogen-bond lengths in the complexes, and gives a proper explanation for the stability of the structure. The charge-transfer from the proton acceptor to the antibonding orbital of the X–H bond in the complexes was studied using natural bond orbital (NBO) analysis.