Vibrational circular dichroism and Raman optical activity of biomolecules: What
information can we extract

Karl J. Jalkanen, K.Jalkanen@curtin.edu.au and Julian D. Gale,
julian@power.curtin.edu.au. Nanochemistry Research Institute, Department of
Applied Chemistry, Curtin University of Technology, GPO Box U1987, Perth,
Western Australia, 6845, Australia

In this talk a brief overview of the theory of vibrational circular dichroism
(VCD) and Raman optical activity (ROA) will be given and the various ways to
treat the effects due to the environment both explicitly, implicitly and with
hybrid approaches. The use of theory to fully interpret and understand the
experimental vibrational absorption (VA), VCD, Raman scattering and ROA spectra
of biomolecules will be discussed with examples. Finally the use of changes in
the these spectra as a function of environment will be shown to be useful not
only in monitoring conformational differences, but also structural and
functional states of the molecules, as well as ligand binding and aggregation.