Conformational Properties of Polypeptide Models of Collagen

Individual collagen chains exist as Polypro II helices because of their large imino content and their super-coiling into the collagen triple helix is facilitated by Gly in every third position. Because of this, collagen may be considered as being made up of Gly-led triplets. One fourth of such triplets in collagen have the sequence Gly-Pro-X and another one fifth, Gly-X-Hyp, where X is an α-amino residue. The stereochemical properties of the …