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The effects of trimethylamine N‐oxide (TMAO) on guanidinium chloride and hydrogen‐bonded networks of water are explored in this joint Raman spectroscopic and quantum chemical study. Both TMAO and guanidinium are osmolytes that affect the stability of proteins, as TMAO is known to stabilize and counteract the destabilizing effects of guanidinium. While guanidinium is very similar in chemical structure to urea, the exact mechanisms of the molecular interactions between guanidinium, TMAO, and proteins continue to be investigated. Herein, we use Raman spectroscopy to elucidate the physical interactions between TMAO and guanidinium in aqueous solutions to better understand how these important osmolytes interact with each other and affect adjacent hydrogen‐bonding networks of water. Comparing experiment to theory yields good agreement and allows for the identification and tracking of different vibrational modes. It was determined that adding TMAO into an aqueous solution of guanidinium induces a blue shift (shift to higher energy) in guanidinium's H‐N‐H bending modes, which is indicative of direct interactions between the two osmolytes and similar to the earlier results observed for TMAO interacting with urea.

Thes‐homodesmotic method for computing conventional strain energies (CSE) has been extended for the first time to bicyclic systems and to individual rings within these systems. Unique isodesmic, homodesmotic, and hyperhomodesmotic reactions originate from thes‐homodesmotic method. These are used to investigate 12 bicyclic systems comprising cyclopropane and cyclobutane and how the CSE of each system compares to the sum of the individual rings within each. Equilibrium geometries, harmonic vibrational frequencies, and the corresponding electronic energies and zero point vibrational energy corrections are computed for all relevant molecules using second‐order perturbation theory and density functional theory (B3LYP) with the correlation consistent basis sets cc‐pVDZ and cc‐pVTZ. Single‐point CCSD(T) energies are computed at the MP2/cc‐pVTZ optimized geometries to ascertain the importance of higher order correlation effects. Results indicate that CSEs are additive when the two rings are separated by one or two bonds and somewhat additive in other cases.