Proton-Coupled Electron Transfer of Tyrosine Oxidation:  Buffer Dependence and Parallel Mechanisms

The proton-coupled electron transfer (PCET) from tyrosine covalently linked to a metal complex has been studied. The reaction was induced by laser flash excitation of the metal complex, and PCET was bidirectional, with electron transfer to the excited or flash-quenched oxidized metal complex and proton transfer to water or added buffers in the solution. We found a competition between three different PCET mechanisms: (1) A concerted PCET with water as the proton acceptor, which indeed shows a pH-dependence as earlier reported (Sjödin, M.; Styring, S.; Åkermark, B.; Sun, L.; Hammarström, L. J. Am. Chem. Soc. 2000, 122, 3932); (2) a stepwise electron transfer−proton transfer (ETPT) that is pH-independent; (3) a buffer-assisted concerted PCET. The relative importance of reaction 2 increases with oxidant strength, while that of reaction 1 increases with pH. At higher buffer concentrations reaction 3 becomes important, and the rate follows the expected first-order dependence on the concentration of the buffer base. Most importantly, the pH-dependence of reaction 1, with a slope of 0.4−0.5 in a plot of log k vs pH, is independent of buffer and cannot be explained by reaction schemes with simple first-order dependencies on OH-, H3O+, or buffer species.