Molecular structure refinement by direct fitting of atomic coordinates to experimental ESR spectra

Performance of DFT methods in the calculation of isotropic and dipolar contributions to 14N hyperfine coupling constants of nitroxide radicals

In the present study, we tested the widely used density functionals BP86, PBE, OLYP, TPSS, M06-L, B3LYP, PBE0, mPW1PW, B97, BHandHLYP, TPSS0, M06, M06-2X, CAM-B3LYP, ωB97x, and B2PLYP with the cc-pCVQZ basis set in calculations on a set of 23 nitroxide radicals with well-resolved ¹⁴N anisotropic hyperfine coupling (HFC) constants. The results were compared with those obtained using the B3LYP/N07D and PBE/N07D methods. The convergence of the HFC values to the complete basis set limit is briefly discussed. The best results were obtained using the M06/COSMO method, with a mean absolute deviation (MAD) of 0.4 G for the dipole-dipole contribution and MAD = 0.6 G for the contact coupling contribution (as compared to 1.1 G and 1.0 G, respectively, for the B3LYP/N07D/COSMO method and 1.7 G and 0.5 G, respectively, for the B3LYP/N07D method). The majority of the functionals yielded satisfactory results for the dipole-dipole contribution, but only the M06 functional yielded similar errors for both the dipole-dipole and isotropic contributions. The RIJCOSX and RI approximations introduced errors equal to or smaller than 0.01 G.

Quantum mechanical NMR simulation algorithm for protein-size spin systems

Nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy is one of the few remaining areas of physical chemistry for which polynomially scaling quantum mechanical simulation methods have not so far been available. In this communication we adapt the restricted state space approximation to protein NMR spectroscopy and illustrate its performance by simulating common 2D and 3D liquid state NMR experiments (including accurate description of relaxation processes using Bloch-Redfield-Wangsness theory) on isotopically enriched human ubiquitin - a protein containing over a thousand nuclear spins forming an irregular polycyclic three-dimensional coupling lattice. The algorithm uses careful tailoring of the density operator space to only include nuclear spin states that are populated to a significant extent. The reduced state space is generated by analysing spin connectivity and decoherence properties: rapidly relaxing states as well as correlations between topologically remote spins are dropped from the basis set.