Fingerprint of dissolved glycine in the Terahertz range explained
Friday, March 28, 2014 - 09:00
in Physics & Chemistry
Chemists at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum (RUB) have, for the first time, completely analysed the fingerprint region of the Terahertz spectrum of a biologically relevant molecule in water, in this case, an amino acid. By combining spectroscopy and molecular-dynamics simulations, they rendered the motion of the most basic amino acid, glycine, visible in an aqueous solution. Their results have disproved the long-standing theory that frequencies in the Terahertz range provide no information regarding the amino acid's motion. The team led by Prof Dr Martina Havenith-Newen and Prof Dr Dominik Marx published their report in the Journal of the American Chemical Society (JACS).