Hybrid Quantum Mechanical/Molecular Mechanical Methods For Studying Energy Transduction in Biomolecular Machines.

Hybrid quantum mechanical/molecular mechanical (QM/MM) methods have become indispensable tools for the study of biomolecules. In this article, we briefly review the basic methodological details of QM/MM approaches and discuss their applications to various energy transduction problems in biomolecular machines, such as long-range proton transports, fast electron transfers, and mechanochemical coupling. We highlight the particular importance for these applications of balancing computational efficiency and accuracy. Using several recent examples, we illustrate the value and limitations of QM/MM methodologies for both ground and excited states, as well as strategies for calibrating them in specific applications. We conclude with brief comments on several areas that can benefit from further efforts to make QM/MM analyses more quantitative and applicable to increasingly complex biological problems.

DFTB+, a software package for efficient approximate density functional theory based atomistic simulations.

DFTB+ is a versatile community developed open source software package offering fast and efficient methods for carrying out atomistic quantum mechanical simulations. By implementing various methods approximating density functional theory (DFT), such as the density functional based tight binding (DFTB) and the extended tight binding method, it enables simulations of large systems and long timescales with reasonable accuracy while being considerably faster for typical simulations than the respective ab initio methods. Based on the DFTB framework, it additionally offers approximated versions of various DFT extensions including hybrid functionals, time dependent formalism for treating excited systems, electron transport using non-equilibrium Green's functions, and many more. DFTB+ can be used as a user-friendly standalone application in addition to being embedded into other software packages as a library or acting as a calculation-server accessed by socket communication. We give an overview of the recently developed capabilities of the DFTB+ code, demonstrating with a few use case examples, discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the various features, and also discuss on-going developments and possible future perspectives.

Charge transport through biomolecular wires in a solvent: bridging molecular dynamics and model Hamiltonian approaches.

We present a hybrid method based on a combination of classical molecular dynamics simulations, quantum-chemical calculations, and a model Hamiltonian approach to describe charge transport through biomolecular wires with variable lengths in presence of a solvent. The core of our approach consists in a mapping of the biomolecular electronic structure, as obtained from density-functional based tight-binding calculations of molecular structures along molecular dynamics trajectories, onto a low-dimensional model Hamiltonian including the coupling to a dissipative bosonic environment. The latter encodes fluctuation effects arising from the solvent and from the molecular conformational dynamics. We apply this approach to the case of pG-pC and pA-pT DNA oligomers as paradigmatic cases and show that the DNA conformational fluctuations are essential in determining and supporting charge transport.