CAN SEMIEMPIRICAL QUANTUM MODELS CALCULATE THE BINDING ENERGY OF HYDROGEN BONDING FOR BIOLOGICAL SYSTEMS?

Abstract

A modified semiempirical model named RM1BH, which is based on RM1 parameterizations, is proposed to simulate varied biological hydrogen-bonded systems. The RM1BH is formulated by adding Gaussian functions to the core–core repulsion items in original RM1 formula to reproduce the binding energies of hydrogen bonding of experimental and high-level computational results. In the parameterizations of our new model, 35 base-pair dimers, 18 amino acid residue dimers, 14 dimers between a base and an amino acid residue, and 20 other multimers were included. The results performed with RM1BH were compared with experimental values and the benchmark density-functional (B3LYP/6-31G**/BSSE) and Möller–Plesset perturbation (MP2/6-31G**/BSSE) calculations on various biological hydrogen-bonded systems. It was demonstrated that RM1BH model outperforms the PM3 and RM1 models in the calculations of the binding energies of biological hydrogen-bonded systems by very close agreement with the values of both high-level calculations and experiments. These results provide insight into the ideas, methods, and views of semiempirical modifications to investigate the weak interactions of biological systems.