Electronic Absorption and Circular Dichroism Spectroscopy of Cu(II) and Pd(II) Complexes with Polyelectrolytes Derived from Amino Acids

The formation of complexes between macromolecular ligands and transition metal ions has been widely investigated in recent years 1–3 . These systems are made up of synthetic polyelectrolytes, and are considered as simple but representative models of biological ligand-metal interactions4. Polymers (I) derived from L-alanine, L-glutamic acid, L-methionine, L-phenylalanine as well as model molecules representing their repetition units (II), were prepared for this purpose and their complexation with Cu(II) and Pd(II) has been been investigated by UV-Vis spectroscopy and circular dichroism, in order to determine the structure of the complexes.