New helical foldamers: heterogeneous backbones with 1:2 and 2:1 alpha:beta-amino acid residue patterns.

Foldamers, oligomers with strong folding propensities, are subjects of growing interest because such compounds offer unique scaffolds for the development of molecular function. We report two new foldamer classes, oligopeptides with regular 1:2 or 2:1 patterns of alpha- and beta-amino acid residues. Two distinct helical conformations are detected via 2D NMR in methanol for each backbone. One of the helices for each backbone is characterized via X-ray crystallography.