Towards ab-initio calculation of the circular dichroism of peptides

In this work we plan to use ab initio spectroscopy calculations to compute circular dichroism (CD) spectra of peptides. CD provides information on protein secondary structure content; peptides, instead, remain difficult to address, due to their tendency to adopt multiple conformations in equilibrium. Therefore pep tides are an interesting test-case for ab initio calculation of CD spectra. As a first application, we focus on the (8392) fragment of HIV-1 protease, which is known to be involved in the folding and dimerization of this protein. As a preliminary step, we performed classical molecular dynamics (MD) simulations, in order to obtain a set of representative conformers of the peptide. Then, on some of the obtained conformations, we calculated absorption spectra at the independent particle, RPA and TDLDA levels, showing the presence of charge transfer excitations, and their influence on spectral features.