| Abstract
| - We previously reported the design and synthesis of a new class of artificial α-helices in whichan N-terminal main-chain hydrogen bond is replaced by a carbon−carbon bond derived from a ring-closingmetathesis reaction [Chapman, R. N.; Dimartino, G.; Arora, P. S. J. Am. Chem. Soc.2004, 126, 12252−12253]. Our initial study utilized an alanine-rich sequence; in the present manuscript we evaluate the potentialof this method for the synthesis of very short (10 residues) α-helices representing two different biologicallyrelevant α-helical domains. We extensively characterized these two sets of artificial helices by NMR andcircular dichroism spectroscopies and find that the hydrogen-bond surrogate approach can afford well-defined short α-helical structures from sequences that do not spontaneously form α-helical conformations.
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