Ab initio study of molecular properties of l-tyrosine.

contextl-Tyrosine is a naturally occurring agent that acts as a precursor in biosynthesis of monoaminergic neurotransmitters in brain such as dopamine, adrenaline, noradrenaline, and hormones like thyroxine and triiodothyronine. While l-tyrosine in vacuo adopts the canonical aminoacid form with -NH

methodsThe energetic data at the Hartree-Fock MO-LCAO-SCF method has been conducted using def2-TZVP basis set, and improved by the many-body perturbation theory using the MP2 correction to the correlation energy. For the aminoacid form and the zwitterionic form of l-tyrosine, a set of molecular descriptors has been evaluated (ionization energy, electron affinity, molecular electronegativity, chemical hardness, electrophilicity index, dipole moment, quadrupole moment, and dipole polarizability). The solvent effect (CPCM) is very expressive to the zwitterionic form and alters the sign of the electron affinity from positive to negative values. In parallel, density-functional theory with B3LYP variant in the same basis set has been employed for full geometry optimization of the neutral and ionized forms of l-tyrosine allowing assessing the adiabatic (a) ionization/affinity processes. The complete vibrational analysis enables evaluating thermodynamic functions such as the inner energy, enthalpy, entropy, Gibbs energy, and consequently the absolute oxidation and reduction potentials. Of applied methods, the most reliable are B3LYP(a) results that account to the correlation energy and the electron and nuclear relaxation during the ionization/affinity processes.