Chiral effects in amino acid adsorption on Au(111): A comparison of cysteine, homocysteine and methionine

A combined classical/quantum methodology is used to examine chiral effects upon adsorption of three sulfur-containing amino acids on the Au(111) surface: cysteine, homocysteine and methionine. Parallel tempering Monte Carlo simulations were employed to broadly examine the configurational space of monomers, dimers and trimers of the molecules on the gold surface. Density functional theory was applied to promising structural targets in order to incorporate higher order electronic structure effects in a study of relative stabilities of the various molecular states upon adsorption. As the precursors of chiral structure formation, like and unlike dimers were investigated at some length, with consideration given to the mode of sorption (chemisorption of physisorption) and the existence of zwitterionic states. We found that neutral (non-zwitterionic) molecules adsorbed weakly on the highly-coordinated Au(111) surfaces. As a consequence, pair configurations in dimers were insufficiently constrained to lead to differential stabilities of homochiral and heterochiral dimers. Whereas neutral molecule interactions were non-discriminating, strong chiral discrimination was found in zwitterionic amino acids. The zwitterionic forms of the larger molecules equilibrated closer to the surface, and the stronger molecule–molecule and molecule–surface interactions were such that homochiral dimers were stable whereas heterochiral dimers were not.