Recent advances in jointed quantum mechanics and molecular mechanics calculations of biological macromolecules: schemes and applications coupled to ab initio calculations

Quantum mechanical methods for the investigation of metalloproteins and related bioinorganic compounds

It is well known that transition metal ions are often bound to proteins, conveying very specific functional properties. In fact, metalloproteins play crucial biological roles in the transport and activation of small molecules such as H2, O2, and N2, as well as in several other biochemical processes. However, even if the presence of transition metals in the active site of proteins allows a very rich biochemistry, the experimental disclosure of structure-activity relationships in metalloproteins is generally difficult exactly because of the presence of transition metals, which are intrinsically characterized by a very versatile and often elusive chemistry. For this reason, computational methods are becoming very popular tools in the characterization of metalloproteins. In particular, since computing power is becoming less and less expensive, due to the continuous technological development of CPUs, the computational tools suited to investigate metalloproteins are becoming more accessible and therefore more commonly used also in molecular biology and biochemistry laboratories. Here, we present the main procedures and computational methods based on quantum mechanics, which are commonly used to study the structural, electronic, and reactivity properties of metalloproteins and related bioinspired compounds, with a specific focus on the practical and technical aspects that must be generally tackled to properly study such biomolecular systems.

Pseudobond parameters for QM/MM studies involving nucleosides, nucleotides, and their analogs

In biological systems involving nucleosides, nucleotides, or their respective analogs, the ribose sugar moiety is the most common reaction site, for example, during DNA replication and repair. However, nucleic bases, which comprise a sizable portion of nucleotide molecules, are usually unreactive during such processes. In quantum mechanical∕molecular simulations of nucleic acid reactivity, it may therefore be advantageous to describe specific ribosyl or ribosyl phosphate groups quantum mechanically and their respective nucleic bases with a molecular mechanics potential function. Here, we have extended the pseudobond approach to enable quantum mechanical∕molecular mechanical simulations involving nucleotides, nucleosides, and their analogs in which the interface between the two subsystems is located between the sugar and the base, namely, the C(sp(3))-N(sp(2)) bond. The pseudobond parameters were optimized on a training set of 10 molecules representing several nucleotide and nucleoside bases and analogs, and they were then tested on a larger test set of 20 diverse molecules. Particular emphasis was placed on providing accurate geometries and electrostatic properties, including electrostatic potential, natural bond orbital (NBO) and atoms in molecules (AIM) charges and AIM first moments. We also tested the optimized parameters on five nucleotide and nucleoside analogues of pharmaceutical relevance and a small polypeptide (triglycine). Accuracy was maintained for these systems, which highlights the generality and transferability of the pseudobond approach.