Cyclic peptides are a promising class of compounds for
next-generation
antibiotics as they may provide new ways of limiting antibiotic resistance
development. Although their cyclic structure will introduce some rigidity,
their conformational space is large and they usually have multiple
chiral centers that give rise to a wide range of possible stereoisomers.
Chiroptical spectroscopies such as vibrational circular dichroism
(VCD) are used to assign stereochemistry and discriminate enantiomers
of chiral molecules, often in combination with electronic structure
methods. The reliable determination of the absolute configuration
of cyclic peptides will require robust computational methods than
can identify all significant conformers and their relative population
and reliably assign their stereochemistry from their chiroptical spectra
by comparison with
ab initio
calculated spectra.
We here present a computational protocol for the accurate calculation
of the VCD spectra of a series of flexible cyclic oligopeptides. The
protocol builds on the Conformer-Rotamer Ensemble Sampling Tool (CREST)
developed by Grimme and co-workers (
32073075
Phys. Chem. Chem. Phys.
2020
22
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7192
and
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J. Chem. Theory. Comput.
2019
15
2847
2862
) in combination with postoptimizations using
B3LYP and moderately sized basis sets. Our recommended computational
protocol for the computation of VCD spectra of cyclic oligopeptides
consists of three steps: (1) conformational sampling with CREST and
tight-binding density functional theory (xTB); (2) energy ranking
based on single-point energy calculations as well as geometry optimization
and VCD calculations of conformers that are within 2.5 kcal/mol of
the most stable conformer using B3LYP/6-31+G*/CPCM; and (3) VCD spectra
generation based on Boltzmann weighting with Gibbs free energies.
Our protocol provides a feasible basis for generating VCD spectra
also for larger cyclic peptides of biological/pharmaceutical interest
and can thus be used to investigate promising compounds for next-generation
antibiotics.