The mechanism of dediazoniation of 2,4,6-trimethylbenzenediazonium ion, 1-ArN 2 + , in concentrated aqueous solutions of acetamide, N-methylacetamide, and N,N-dimethylacetamide (peptide bond models) was probed by a combination of techniques including HPLC, GC/MS, and H 2 18 O isotopic labeling. The kinetics and product distributions are completely consistent with the heterolytic dediazoniation mechanism, i.e., ratedetermining loss of N 2 followed by trapping of the aryl cation intermediate, 1-Ar+, by H 2 O and the oxygens and nitrogens of the amides. Aryl imidates formed from trapping by amide O hydrolyze rapidly into aryl ester/amine and amide/phenol product pairs. The results were used to estimate the selectivity of 1-Ar+ toward the amide oxygens and nitrogens versus H 2 O. 1-Ar+ is only 10-40% more selective toward H 2 O than amide O, but it is more than 10 times more selective toward H 2 O than the amide N. 1-Ar+ is slightly more selective toward the N of acetamide than N-methylacetamide. However, within the HPLC detection limit, 1-Ar+ does not give a product from reaction with the N,N-dimethylacetamide nitrogen. The selectivities are interpreted by using a preassociation model, i.e., selective solvation by the different nucleophiles of the reactive diazonio group in the ground state. These results indicate that chemical tagging (trapping by N) and cleaving (trapping by O) of the peptide bonds and the weakly basic side chains of polypeptides and proteins bound to association colloids, vesicles and biomembranes, and emulsions may provide new information on their topologies and orientations at the aggregates' interfaces.

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Chemical trapping is a powerful approach for obtaining experimental estimates of interfacial molarities of weakly basic nucleophiles in the interfacial regions of amphiphile aggregates. Here, we demonstrate that the chemical probe 4-hexadecyl-2,6-dimethylbenzenediazonium ion (16-ArN(2)(+)) reacts competitively with interfacial water, with the amide carbonyl followed by cleavage of the headgroups from the tail at the amide oxygen, and with the terminal carboxylate groups in micelles of two N-acyl amino-acid amphiphiles, sodium N-lauroylsarcosinate (SLS) and sodium N-lauroylglycinate (SLG), simple peptide bond model amphiphiles. Interfacial molarities (in moles per liter of interfacial volume) of these three groups were obtained from product yields, assuming that selectivity toward a particular nucleophile compared to water is the same in an aqueous reference solution and in the interfacial region. Interfacial carboxylate group molarities are ~1.5 M in both SLS and SLG micelles, but the concentration of the amide carbonyl for SLS micelles is ~4.6-5 times less (ca. 0.7 M) than that of SLG micelles (~3 M). The proton on the secondary N of SLG helps solubilize the amide bond in the aqueous region, but the methyl on the tertiary N of SLS helps solubilize the amide bond in the micellar core, reducing its reaction with 16-ArN(2)(+). Application of chemical trapping to proteins in membrane mimetic interfaces should provide insight into the topology of the protein within the interface because trapping of the amide carbonyl and cleavage at the C-N bond occurs only within the interface, and fragment characterization marks those peptide bonds located within the interface.