Deep proton tunneling in the electronically adiabatic and non-adiabatic limits: comparison of the quantum and classical treatment of donor-acceptor motion in a protein environment.

Analytical models describing the temperature dependence of the deep tunneling rate, useful for proton, hydrogen, or hydride transfer in proteins, are developed and compared. Electronically adiabatic and non-adiabatic expressions are presented where the donor-acceptor (D-A) motion is treated either as a quantized vibration or as a classical "gating" distribution. We stress the importance of fitting experimental data on an absolute scale in the electronically adiabatic limit, which normally applies to these reactions, and find that vibrationally enhanced deep tunneling takes place on sub-ns timescales at room temperature for typical H-bonding distances. As noted previously, a small room temperature kinetic isotope effect (KIE) does not eliminate deep tunneling as a major transport channel. The quantum approach focuses on the vibrational sub-space composed of the D-A and hydrogen atom motions, where hydrogen bonding and protein restoring forces quantize the D-A vibration. A Duschinsky rotation is mandated between the normal modes of the reactant and product states and the rotation angle depends on the tunneling particle mass. This tunnel-mass dependent rotation contributes substantially to the KIE and its temperature dependence. The effect of the Duschinsky rotation is solved exactly to find the rate in the electronically non-adiabatic limit and compared to the Born-Oppenheimer (B-O) approximation approach. The B-O approximation is employed to find the rate in the electronically adiabatic limit, where we explore both harmonic and quartic double-well potentials for the hydrogen atom bound states. Both the electronically adiabatic and non-adiabatic rates are found to diverge at high temperature unless the proton coupling includes the often neglected quadratic term in the D-A displacement from equilibrium. A new expression is presented for the electronically adiabatic tunnel rate in the classical limit for D-A motion that should be useful to experimentalists working near room temperature. This expression also holds when a broad protein conformational distribution of D-A equilibrium distances dominates the spread of the D-A vibrational wavefunction.