Abstract
Petticolas and Dowley have reported an approximate calculation of the acoustical phonon spectrum of a simplified helical model in the harmonic approximation1. The purpose of the present communication is to report that the normal modes of motion have already been obtained for a number of polymeric molecules of greater complexity than the model considered by the authors and the corresponding phonon spectra have been measured by the inelastic neutron scattering technique2. Moreover, Petticolas and Dowley's model involves only intrachain hydrogen bonded helix and is quite inapplicable to the polyglycine molecule which they discuss because in this molecule only interchain hydrogen bonds are present3. In other polypeptides, which exist in the helix form, the-presence of bulky side groups is expected to change-appreciably the dispersion of the low frequency modes, of vibration.
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References
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Bamford, C. H., Elliot, A., and Hanby, W. E., (eds.), Synthetic Polypeptides (Academic Press, New York, 1956).
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Tasumi, M., Shimanouchi, T., and Miyazawa, T., J. Mol. Spectros., 9, 261 (1962).
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GUPTA, V., BOUTIN, H. & TREVINO, S. Phonon Spectra of Helical Biopolymers. Nature 214, 1325–1326 (1967). https://doi.org/10.1038/2141325a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/2141325a0
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