Acid-base thermochemistry of isolated amino acids containing oxygen or sulfur in their side chain (serine, threonine, cysteine and methionine) have been examined by quantum chemical computations. Density functional theory (DFT) was used, with B3LYP, B97-D and M06-2X functionals using the 6-31+G(d,p) basis set for geometry optimizations and the larger 6-311++G(3df,2p) basis set for energy computations. Composite methods CBS-QB3, G3B3, G4MP2 and G4 were applied to large sets of neutral, protonated and deprotonated conformers. Conformational analysis of these species, based on chemical approach and AMOEBA force field calculations, has been used to identify the lowest energy conformers and to estimate the population of conformers expected to be present at thermal equilibrium at 298 K. It is observed that G4, G4MP2, G3B3, CBS-QB3 composite methods and M06-2X DFT lead to similar conformer energies. Thermochemical parameters have been computed using either the most stable conformers or equilibrium populations of conformers. Comparison of experimental and theoretical proton affinities and Δ(acid)H shows that the G4 method provides the better agreement with deviations of less than 1.5 kJ mol(-1). From this point of view, a set of evaluated thermochemical quantities for serine, threonine, cysteine and methionine may be proposed: PA = 912, 919, 903, 938; GB = 878, 886, 870, 899; Δ(acid)H = 1393, 1391, 1396, 1411; Δ(acid)G = 1363, 1362, 1367, 1382 kJ mol(-1). This study also confirms that a non-negligible ΔpS° is associated with protonation of methionine and that the most acidic hydrogen of cysteine in the gas phase is that of the SH group. In several instances new conformers were identified thus suggesting a re-examination of several IRMPD spectra.

We assess the pros and cons of a large panel of DFT exchange-correlation functionals for the prediction of the electronic structure of hydrogen-rich peptide radicals formed after electron attachment on a protonated peptide. Indeed, despite its importance in the understanding of the chemical changes associated with the reduction step, the question of the attachment site of an electron and, more generally, of the reduced species formed in the gas phase through electron-induced dissociation (ExD) processes in mass spectrometry is still a matter of debate. For hydrogen-rich peptide radicals in which several positive groups and low-lying π* orbitals can capture the incoming electron in ExD, inclusion of full Hartree-Fock exchange at long-range interelectronic distance is a prerequisite for an accurate description of the electronic states, thereby excluding several popular exchange-correlation functionals, e.g., B3LYP, M06-2X, or CAM-B3LYP. However, we show that this condition is not sufficient by comparing the results obtained with asymptotically correct range-separated hybrids (M11, LC-BLYP, LC-BPW91, ωB97, ωB97X, and ωB97X-D) and with reference CASSCF-MRCI and EOM-CCSD calculations. The attenuation parameter ω significantly tunes the spin density distribution and the excited states vertical energies. The investigated model structures, ranging from methylammonium to hexapeptide, allow us to obtain a description of the nature and energy of the electronic states, depending on (i) the presence of hydrogen bond(s) around the cationic site(s), (ii) the presence of π* molecular orbitals (MOs), and (iii) the selected DFT approach. It turns out that, in the present framework, LC-BLYP and ωB97 yields the most accurate results.