Benchmark Ab Initio Determination of the Conformers, Proton Affinities, and Gas-Phase Basicities of Cysteine

A systematic conformational mapping combined with literature data leads to 85 stable neutral cysteine conformers. The implementation of the same mapping process for the protonated counterparts reveals 21 N-(amino-), 64 O-(carbonyl-), and 37 S-(thiol-)protonated cysteine conformers. Their relative energies and harmonic vibrational frequencies are given at the MP2/aug-cc-pVDZ level of theory. Further benchmark ab initio computations are performed for the 10 lowest-lying neutral and protonated amino acid conformers (for each type) such as CCSD(T)-F12a/cc-pVDZ-F12 geometry optimizations (and frequency computations for cysteine) as well as auxiliary correction computations of the basis set effects up to CCSD(T)-F12b/cc-pVQZ-F12, electron correlation effects up to CCSDT(Q), core correlation effects, second-order Douglass-Kroll relativistic effects, and zero-point energy contributions. Boltzmann-averaged 0 (298.15) K proton affinity and [298.15 K gas-phase basicity] values of cysteine are predicted to be 214.96 (216.39) [208.21], 201.83 (203.55) [194.16], and 193.31 (194.74) [186.40] kcal/mol for N-, O-, and S-protonation, respectively, also considering the previously described auxiliary corrections.