Theoretical study of the electrostatic and steric effects on the spectroscopic characteristics of the metal-ligand unit of heme proteins. 2. C-O vibrational frequencies, 17O isotropic chemical shifts, and nuclear quadrupole coupling constants.

The quantum chemical calculations, vibronic theory of activation, and London-Pople approach are used to study the dependence of the C-O vibrational frequency, 17O isotropic chemical shift, and nuclear quadrupole coupling constant on the distortion of the porphyrin ring and geometry of the CO coordination, changes in the iron-carbon and iron-imidazole distances, magnitude of the iron displacement out of the porphyrin plane, and presence of the charged groups in the heme environment. It is shown that only the electrostatic interactions can cause the variation of all these parameters experimentally observed in different heme proteins, and the heme distortions could modulate this variation. The correlations between the theoretically calculated parameters are shown to be close to the experimentally observed ones. The study of the effect of the electric field of the distal histidine shows that the presence of the four C-O vibrational bands in the infrared absorption spectra of the carbon monoxide complexes of different myoglobins and hemoglobins can be caused by the different orientations of the different tautomeric forms of the distal histidine. The dependence of the 17O isotropic chemical shift and nuclear quadrupole coupling constant on pH and the distal histidine substitution can be also explained from the same point of view.