Measurement and modeling of acid dissociation constants of tri-peptides containing Glu, Gly, and His using potentiometry and generalized multiplicative analysis of variance.

We report pK(a) values with measurement uncertainties for all labile protons of the 27 tri-peptides prepared from the amino acids glutamic acid (E), glycine (G) and histidine (H). Each tri-peptide (GGG, GGE, GGH, …, HHH) was subjected to alkali titration and pK(a) values were calculated from triplicate potentiometric titrations data using HyperQuad 2008 software. A generalized multiplicative analysis of variance (GEMANOVA) of pK(a) values for the most acidic proton gave the optimum model having two terms, an interaction between the end amino acids plus an isolated main effect of the central amino acid.