Journal of Physical Chemistry B, Vol.117, No.49, 15297-15305, 2013
2D IR Cross Peaks Reveal Hydrogen Deuterium Exchange with Single Residue Specificity
A form of chemical exchange, hydrogen deuterium exchange (HDX), has long been used as a method for studying the secondary and tertiary structure of peptides and proteins using mass spectrometry and NMR spectroscopy. Using two-dimensional infrared (2D IR) spectroscopy, we resolve cross peaks between the amide II band and a (CO)-C-13-O-18 isotope-labeled amide I band, which we show measures HDX with site-specific resolution. By rapidly scanning 2D IR spectra using mid-IR pulse shaping, we monitor the kinetics of HDX exchange on-the-fly. For the antimicrobial peptide ovispirin bound to membrane bilayers, we find that the amide II peak decays with a biexponential with rate constants of 0.54 +/- 0.02 and 0.12 +/- 0.01 min(-1), which is a measure of the overall HDX in the peptide. The cross peaks between Ile-10-labeled ovispirin and the amide II mode, which specifically monitor HDX kinetics at Ile-10, decay with a single rate constant of 0.36 +/- 0.1 min(-1) Comparing this exchange rate to theoretically determined exchange rates of Ile-10 for ovispirin in a solution random coil configuration, the exchange rate at Ile-10 is at least 100 times slower, consistent with the known a-helix structure of ovispirin in bilayers. Because backbone isotope labels produce only a very small shift of the amide II band, site-specific HDX cannot be measured with FTIR spectroscopy, which is why 2D IR spectroscopy is needed for these measurements.