Study of electronegativity equalization method in the calculation of solvation free energies GBEEM-ELR

Author(s)

Karina Shimizu

• Document type: Doctoral Thesis
• Press: São Paulo.
• Institution: Universidade de São Paulo (USP). Conjunto das Químicas (IQ e FCF) (CQ/DBDCQ)
• Defense date: 2005-12-15

Examining board members

Joao Pedro Simon Farah; Luis Gustavo Dias; Sergio Emanuel Galembeck; Frank Herbert Quina; Mauro Carlos Costa Ribeiro

• Advisor: Joao Pedro Simon Farah

Abstract

The electronegativity equalization method (EEM), founded on density functional theory (DFT), has been combined to the generalized Born approximation (GB) for molecules, and called GBEEM (Dias et al., 2002). The permanent dipole moment in vacuum and condensed phase (dieletric constant ~ 80), and atomic charges distributions, have shown good agreement with SM5.4 solvation model based on CM1 charges at PM3 level (12 molecules, corresponding to 29 atomic charges). This result is interesting due the simplicity of GBEEM and its low computational cost. A new parameterization of the hardness and electronegativities was done with the aim to improve the atomic charges distribution on isolated molecules in comparison to CM1 model. The training set with 250 PM3/CM1 structures/charges of neutral molecules in 13 different organic functions was employed as target in the parameterization. A new optimization approach composed of Genetic and Simplex algorithms was used to fit parameters (Menegon et al., 2002). Good agreement between the models was found. The validation of parameterization and EEM was done using bifunctional molecules (tri-glucose and tetra-peptide) showing good agreement and robustness. However, analysis of permanent dipole moments of 250 molecules shown a serious caveat of EEM and GBEEM, beside the good agreement between EEM and CM1 charges. EEM has overestimated the dipole moments. Such result may be due to the truncated expansion in atomic charges and lacking of explicit treatment of exchange interaction. A new approximation was proposed constraining the charge transfer between groups within the molecule. This approximation corrected the caveat of EEM in the prediction of dipole moments in vacuum and condensed phase (Shimizu et al., 2004). Based on these results, a new solvation model was developed founded in GBEEM and Floris-Tomasi model. The parameterization was done with a training set of 62 neutral molecules (13 functional groups) and experimental hydration free energies as target. This new solvation model has produced a mean absolute deviation, MAD, of 0.71 kcal/mol comparing to experimental data. (AU)