CHELPG

Abstract: An improved method for computing potential-derived charges is described which is based upon the CHELP program available from QCPE.1 This approach (CHELPG) is shown to be considerably less dependent upon molecular orientation than the original CHELP program. In the second part of this work, the CHELPG point selection algorithm was used to analyze the changes in the potential-derived charges in formamide during rotation about the CN bond. In order to achieve a level of rotational invariance less than 10% of the magnitude of the electronic effects studied, an equally-spaced array of points 0.3 A apart was required. Points found to be greater than 2.8 A from any nucleus were eliminated, along with all points contained within the defined VDW distances from each of the atoms. The results are compared to those obtained by using CHELP. Even when large numbers of points (ca. 3000) were sampled using the CHELP selection routine, the results did not indicate a satisfactory level of rotatational invariance. On the basis of these results, the original CHELP program was found to be inadequate for analyzing internal rotations.

Abstract: We present an approach for deriving net atomic charges from ab initio quantum mechanical calculations using a least squares fit of the quantum mechanically calculated electrostatic potential to that of the partial charge model. Our computational approach is similar to those presented by Momany [J. Phys. Chem., 82, 592 (1978)], Smit, Derissen, and van Duijneveldt [Mol. Phys., 37, 521 (1979)], and Cox and Williams [J. Comput. Chem., 2, 304 (1981)], but differs in the approach to choosing the positions for evaluating the potential. In this article, we present applications to the molecules H2O, CH3OH, (CH3)2O, H2CO, NH3, (CH3O)2PO, deoxyribose, ribose, adenine, 9-CH3 adenine, thymine, 1-CH3 thymine, guanine, 9-CH3 guanine, cytosine, 1-CH3 cytosine, uracil, and 1-CH3 uracil. We also address the question of inclusion of “lone pairs,” their location and charge.

Abstract: It is demonstrated that semiempirical methods give electrostatic potential (ESP) derived atomic point charges that are in reasonable agreement with ab initio ESP charges. Furthermore, we find that MNDO ESP charges are superior to AM1 ESP charges in correlating with ESP charges derived from the 6-31G* basis set. Thus, it is possible to obtain 6-31G* quality point charges by simply scaling MNDO ESP charges. The charges are scaled in a linear (y = Mx) manner to conserve charge. In this way researchers desiring to carry out force field simulations or minimizations can obtain charges by using MNDO, which requires much less computer time than the corresponding 6-31G* calculation.

Abstract: The accurate prediction of protein−ligand binding free energies is a primary objective in computer-aided drug design. The solvation free energy of a small molecule provides a surrogate to the desolvation of the ligand in the thermodynamic process of protein−ligand binding. Here, we use explicit solvent molecular dynamics free energy perturbation to predict the absolute solvation free energies of a set of 239 small molecules, spanning diverse chemical functional groups commonly found in drugs and drug-like molecules. We also compare the performance of absolute solvation free energies obtained using the OPLS_2005 force field with two other commonly used small molecule force fields—general AMBER force field (GAFF) with AM1-BCC charges and CHARMm-MSI with CHelpG charges. Using the OPLS_2005 force field, we obtain high correlation with experimental solvation free energies (R2 = 0.94) and low average unsigned errors for a majority of the functional groups compared to AM1-BCC/GAFF or CHelpG/CHARMm-MSI. However, ...