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Nature, Strength, and Cooperativity of the Hydrogen-Bonding Network in α-Chitin
Biomacromolecules ( IF 5.5 ) Pub Date : 2016-02-11 00:00:00 , DOI: 10.1021/acs.biomac.5b01653
Volker L. Deringer 1 , Ulli Englert 1 , Richard Dronskowski 1
Affiliation  

Chitin is an abundant biopolymer that stabilizes the exoskeleton of insects and gives structure to plants. Its macroscopic properties go back to an intricate network of hydrogen bonds that connect the polymer strands, and these intermolecular links have been under ongoing study. Here, we use atomistic simulations to explore hydrogen bonding in the most abundant form, α-chitin. The crystal structure exhibits disorder, and so discrete models are systematically derived as suitable approximants to the macroscopic material. These models then allow us to perform dispersion-corrected density-functional theory (DFT-D) simulations on the three-dimensional crystal network and on lower-dimensional fragments. Thereby, we rationalize the nature of hydrogen bonding and the role of crystallographic disorder for the stability of α-chitin, and complement previous, larger-scale molecular-dynamics (MD) simulations as well as recent fiber-diffraction experiments. Our results provide new, atomic-level insight into one of Nature’s most abundant building materials, and the techniques and concepts are likely transferable to other biopolymers.

中文翻译:

α-几丁质中氢键网络的性质,强度和协同性

甲壳质是一种丰富的生物聚合物,可稳定昆虫的外骨骼并赋予植物结构。它的宏观特性可以追溯到连接聚合物链的复杂氢键网络,并且这些分子间的连接已在进行中。在这里,我们使用原子模拟来探索最丰富的形式α-甲壳质的氢键。晶体结构表现出无序性,因此系统地导出了离散模型作为宏观材料的合适近似值。然后,这些模型使我们能够在三维晶体网络和低维碎片上执行色散校正的密度泛函理论(DFT-D)仿真。因此,我们合理化了氢键的性质以及结晶紊乱对α-甲壳质稳定性的作用,并补充了先前的内容,大规模分子动力学(MD)模拟以及最近的纤维衍射实验。我们的结果提供了对自然界最丰富的建筑材料之一的原子级的新见解,这些技术和概念很可能会转移到其他生物聚合物中。
更新日期:2016-02-11
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