Hairpin folding behavior of mixed α/ß-peptides in aqueous solution.

The invention of new strategies for the design of protein-mimetic oligomers that manifest the folding encoded in natural amino acid sequences is a significant challenge. In contrast to the α-helix, mimicry of protein ß-sheets is less understood. We report here the aqueous folding behavior of a prototype α-peptide hairpin model sequence varied at cross-strand positions by incorporation of 16 different ß-amino acid monomers. Our results provide a folding propensity scale for ß-residues in a protein ß-sheet context as well as high-resolution structures of several mixed-backbone α/ß-peptide hairpins in water.