Benchmark ab initio proton affinity of glycine

Abstract

A systematic conformational search reveals three N- (amino) and eight O- (carbonyl) protonated glycine conformers with benchmark equilibrium(adiabatic) relative energies in the 0.00–7.51(0.00–7.37) and 25.91–31.61(24.45–30.28) kcal mol⁻¹ ranges, respectively. Benchmark ab initio structures of the glycine conformers and its protonated species are obtained at the CCSD(T)-F12b/aug-cc-pVTZ level of theory and the relative energy computations consider basis-set effects up to aug-cc-pVQZ with CCSD(T)-F12b, electron correlation up to CCSDT(Q), core correlation corrections, scalar relativistic effects, and zero-point energy contributions. The best predictions for Boltzmann-averaged 0(298.15) K proton affinities and [298.15 K gas-phase basicities] of glycine are 211.00(212.43)[204.75] and 186.38(187.64)[180.21] kcal mol⁻¹ for N- and O-protonation, respectively, in excellent agreement with experiments.