Synthesis and NMR Strcuture Determination of Bis-Amino-Acid Oligomers

in chapters 2 and 3, I present the synthesis of three bis-amino acid monomers. The pro3 class of monomers were designed to create a sharp turn in a bis-amino acid oligomeric sequences. The pro3(2S4S) monomer was synthesised, but had an unexpected tendency to epimerize when incorporated into an oligomer. The syntheses of two pip5 class monomers were completed in 13% overall yield and 21% overall yield.In the fourth chapter, I present the first use of residual dipolar coupling (RDC)measurement in the solution structure determination of a bis-amino-aicd oligomer. This technique allows the determination of bond orientations within a molecule with respect to the magnetic field of a nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR)spectrometer. I determined that the information gained from the measurement of RDCs can be used to filter a library of conformational models to select the best fit model to the RDC data. The best fit model was found to ve the lowest energy conformation of the bis-amino acid oligomer