How Chiroptical Spectroscopy can determine molecular structure

Vibrational circular dichroism (VCD) and Raman optical activity (ROA) arise from the differential absorption and scattering, respectively, for left and right circularly polarized light. Although these two chiroptical spectroscopic methods play a fundamental role in the determination of absolute configuration, this presentation will highlight a few recent applications which illustrate how these two methods can be applied to extract additional structural information. Examples include a pair of 22-residue antiparallel double-stranded β-helical species and a series of alanine-rich peptides which form α-helices in water.