Toyokazu Ishida

Accuracy of the three‐body fragment molecular orbital method applied to Møller–Plesset perturbation theory

The three‐body energy expansion in the fragment molecular orbital method (FMO) was applied to the 2nd order Møller–Plesset theory (MP2). The accuracy of both the two and three‐body expansions was determined for water clusters, alanine n‐mers (α‐helices and β‐strands) and one synthetic protein, using the 6‐31G* and 6‐311G* basis sets. At the best level of theory (three‐body, two molecules/residues per fragment), the absolute errors in energy relative to ab initio MP2 were at most 1.2 and 5.0 mhartree, for the 6‐31G* and 6‐311G* basis sets, respectively. The relative accuracy was at worst 99.996% and 99.96%, for 6‐31G* and 6‐311G*, respectively. A three‐body approximation was introduced and the optimum threshold value was determined. The protein calculation (6‐31G*) at the production level (FMO2/2) took 3 h on 36 3.2‐GHz Pentium 4 nodes and had the absolute error in the MP2 correlation energy of only 2 kcal/mol.

Short Hydrogen bond between redox-active tyrosine Y Z and D1-His190 in the photosystem II crystal structure

The crystal structure of photosystem II (PSII) analyzed at a resolution of 1.9 Å revealed a remarkably short H-bond between redox-active tyrosine Y(Z) and D1-His190 (2.46 Å donor-acceptor distance). Using large-scale quantum mechanical/molecular mechanical (QM/MM) calculations with the explicit PSII protein environment, we were able to reproduce this remarkably short H-bond in the original geometry of the crystal structure in the neutral [Y(Z)O···H···N(ε)-His-N(δ)H···O═Asn] state, but not in the oxidized states, indicating that the neutral state was the one observed in the crystal structure. In addition to the appropriate redox/protonation state of Y(Z) and D1-His190, we found that the presence of a cluster of water molecules played a key role in shortening the distance between Y(Z) and D1-His190. The orientations of the water molecules in the cluster were energetically stabilized by the highly polarized PSII protein environment, where the Ca ion of the oxygen-evolving complex (OEC) and the OEC ligand D1-Glu189 were also involved.

Change in a protein's electronic structure induced by an explicit solvent: An ab initio fragment molecular orbital study of ubiquitin

The effect of solvation on the electronic structure of the ubiqutin protein was analyzed using the ab initio fragment molecular orbital (FMO) method. FMO calculations were performed for the protein in vacuo, and the protein was immersed in an explicit solvent shell as thick as 12 Å at the HF or MP2 level by using the 6‐31G* basis set. The proteins physical properties examined were the net charge, the dipole moment, the internal energy, and the solvent interaction energy. Comparison of the computational results revealed the following changes in the protein upon solvation. First, the positively charged amino acid residues on the protein surface drew electrons from the solvent, while the negatively charged ones transfer electrons to the solvent. Second, the dipole moment of the protein was enhanced as a result of the polarization. Third, the internal energy of the protein was destabilized, but the destabilization was more than compensated for by the generation of a favorable protein–solvent interaction. Finally, the energetic changes were elicited both by the electron correlation effect of the first solvent shell and by the electrostatic effect of more distant solvent molecules. These findings were consistent with the picture of the solvated protein being a polarizable molecule dissolved in a dielectric media.

Distribution of the Cationic State over the Chlorophyll Pair of the Photosystem II Reaction Center

The reaction center chlorophylls a (Chla) of photosystem II (PSII) are composed of six Chla molecules including the special pair Chla P(D1)/P(D2) harbored by the D1/D2 heterodimer. They serve as the ultimate electron abstractors for water oxidation in the oxygen-evolving Mn(4)CaO(5) cluster. Using the PSII crystal structure analyzed at 1.9 Å resolution, the redox potentials of P(D1)/P(D2) for one-electron oxidation (E(m)) were calculated by considering all PSII subunits and the protonation pattern of all titratable residues. The E(m)(Chla) values were calculated to be 1015-1132 mV for P(D1) and 1141-1201 mV for P(D2), depending on the protonation state of the Mn(4)CaO(5) cluster. The results showed that E(m)(P(D1)) was lower than E(m)(P(D2)), favoring localization of the charge of the cationic state more on P(D1). The P(D1)(•+)/P(D2)(•+) charge ratio determined by the large-scale QM/MM calculations with the explicit PSII protein environment yielded a P(D1)(•+)/P(D2)(•+) ratio of ~80/~20, which was found to be due to the asymmetry in electrostatic characters of several conserved D1/D2 residue pairs that cause the E(m)(P(D1))/E(m)(P(D2)) difference, e.g., D1-Asn181/D2-Arg180, D1-Asn298/D2-Arg294, D1-Asp61/D2-His61, D1-Glu189/D2-Phe188, and D1-Asp170/D2-Phe169. The larger P(D1)(•+) population than P(D2)(•+) appears to be an inevitable fate of the intact PSII that possesses water oxidation activity.

Fragment molecular orbital study of the electronic excitations in the photosynthetic reaction center of Blastochloris viridis

All electron calculations were performed on the photosynthetic reaction center of Blastochloris viridis, using the fragment molecular orbital (FMO) method. The protein complex of 20,581 atoms and 77,754 electrons was divided into 1398 fragments, and the two‐body expansion of FMO/6‐31G* was applied to calculate the ground state. The excited electronic states of the embedded electron transfer system were separately calculated by the configuration interaction singles approach with the multilayer FMO method. Despite the structural symmetry of the system, asymmetric excitation energies were observed, especially on the bacteriopheophytin molecules. The asymmetry was attributed to electrostatic interaction with the surrounding proteins, in which the cytoplasmic side plays a major role.

Effects of Point Mutation on Enzymatic Activity: Correlation between Protein Electronic Structure and Motion in Chorismate Mutase Reaction

Assignment of particular roles to catalytic residues is an important requirement in clearly understanding enzyme functions. Therefore, predicting the catalytic activities of mutant variants is a fundamental challenge in computational biochemistry. Although site-directed mutagenesis is widely used for studying enzymatic activities and other important classes of protein function, interpreting mutation experiments is usually difficult mainly due to side effects induced by point mutations. Because steric and, in many cases, electrostatic effects may affect the local, fine geometries conserved in wild-type proteins that are usually believed to be thermodynamically stable, simply reducing a loss in catalytic activity into clear elements is difficult. To address these important but difficult issues, we performed a systematic ab initio QM/MM computational analysis combined with MD-FEP simulations and all-electron QM calculations for the entire protein matrix. We selected chorismate mutase, one of the simplest and well-known enzymes, to discuss the details of mutational effects on the enzymatic reaction process. On the basis of the reliable free energy profiles of the wild-type enzyme and several mutant variants, we analyzed the effects of point mutations relative to electronic structure and protein dynamics. In general, changes in geometrical parameters introduced by a mutation were usually limited to the local mutational site. However, this local structural modification could affect the global protein dynamics through correlated motions of particular amino acid residues even far from the mutation site. Even for mutant reactions with low catalytic activity, transition state stabilization was observed as a result of conformational modifications and reorganization around the active site. As for the electrostatic effect created by the polar protein environment, the wild-type enzyme was most effectively designed to stabilize the transition state of the reactive substrate, and the effect of global polarization in the electronic structure was found to be a small catalytic element during the process. As electrostatic media for optimum catalysis, both wild-type and mutant variant proteins were generally robust against external electrostatic perturbations. Protein structures have a certain flexibility, which allows them to slightly modulate their conformations to maximize the transition state stabilization in response to the steric perturbations induced by mutations.

Probing protein environment in an enzymatic process: All-electron quantum chemical analysis combined with ab initio quantum mechanical/molecular mechanical modeling of chorismate mutase

In this study, we investigated the electronic character of protein environment in enzymatic processes by performing all-electron QM calculations based on the fragment molecular orbital (FMO) method. By introducing a new computational strategy combining all-electron QM analysis with ab initio QM/MM modeling, we investigated the details of molecular interaction energy between a reactive substrate and amino acid residues at a catalytic site. For a practical application, we selected the chorismate mutase catalyzed reaction as an example. Because the computational time required to perform all-electron QM reaction path searches was very large, we employed the ab initio QM/MM modeling technique to construct reliable reaction profiles and performed all-electron FMO calculations for the selected geometries. The main focus of the paper is to analyze the details of electrostatic stabilization, which is considered to be the major feature of enzymatic catalyses, and to clarify how the electronic structure of proteins is polarized in response to the change in electron distribution of the substrate. By performing interaction energy decomposition analysis from a quantum chemical viewpoint, we clarified the relationship between the location of amino acid residues on the protein domain and the degree of electronic polarization of each residue. In particular, in the enzymatic transition state, Arg7, Glu78, and Arg90 are highly polarized in response to the delocalized electronic character of the substrate, and as a result, a large amount of electrostatic stabilization energy is stored in the molecular interaction between the enzyme and the substrate and supplied for transition state stabilization.

Computational Modeling of Carbohydrate-Recognition Process in E-Selectin Complex: Structural Mapping of Sialyl Lewis X onto Ab Initio QM/MM Free Energy Surface

To advance our knowledge of carbohydrate recognition by lectins, we propose a systematic computational modeling strategy to identify complex sugar-chain conformations on the reduced free energy surface (FES). We selected the complex of E-selectin with sialyl Lewis X (denoted E-selectin/SLe(x) complex) as a first target molecule. First, we introduced the reduced 2D-FES that characterizes conformational changes in carbohydrate structure as well as the degree of solvation stability of the carbohydrate ligand, and evaluated the overall free energy profile by classical molecular dynamics simulation combined with ab initio QM/MM energy corrections. Second, we mapped flexible carbohydrate structures onto the reduced QM/MM 2D-FES, and identified the details of molecular interactions between each monosaccharide component and the amino acid residues at the carbohydrate-recognition domain. Finally, we confirmed the validity of our modeling strategy by evaluating the chemical shielding tensor by ab initio QM/MM-GIAO computations for several QM/MM-refined geometries sampled from the minimum free energy region in the 2D-FES, and compared this theoretical averaging data with the experimental 1D-NMR profile. The model clearly shows that the binding geometries of the E-selectin/SLe(x) complex are determined not by one single, rigid carbohydrate structure but rather by the sum of averaged conformations fluctuating around the minimum free energy region. For the E-selectin/SLe(x) complex, the major molecular interactions are hydrogen bonds between Fuc and the Ca(2+) binding site in the carbohydrate-recognition domain, and Gal is important in determining the ligand specificity.

Full Electron Calculation Beyond 20,000 Atoms: Ground Electronic State of Photosynthetic Proteins

A full electron calculation for the photosynthetic reaction center of Rhodopseudomonas viridis was performed by using the fragment molecular orbital (FMO) method on a massive cluster computer. The target system contains 20,581 atoms and 77,754 electrons, which was divided into 1,398 fragments. According to the FMO prescription, the calculations of the fragments and pairs of the fragments were conducted to obtain the electronic state of the system. The calculation at RHF/6-31G* level of theory took 72.5 hours with 600 CPUs. The CPUs were grouped into several workers, to which the calculations of the fragments were dispatched. An uneven CPU grouping, where two types of workers are generated, was shown to be efficient.

Computational Design of Non-natural Sugar Alcohols to Increase Thermal Storage Density: Beyond Existing Organic Phase Change Materials

Thermal storage, a technology that enables us to control thermal energy, makes it possible to reuse a huge amount of waste heat, and materials with the ability to treat larger thermal energy are in high demand for energy-saving societies. Sugar alcohols are now one promising candidate for phase change materials (PCMs) because of their large thermal storage density. In this study, we computationally design experimentally unknown non-natural sugar alcohols and predict their thermal storage density as a basic step toward the development of new high performance PCMs. The non-natural sugar alcohol molecules are constructed in silico in accordance with the previously suggested molecular design guidelines: linear elongation of a carbon backbone, separated distribution of OH groups, and even numbers of carbon atoms. Their crystal structures are then predicted using the random search method and first-principles calculations. Our molecular simulation results clearly demonstrate that the non-natural sugar alcohols have potential ability to have thermal storage density up to ∼450-500 kJ/kg, which is significantly larger than the maximum thermal storage density of the present known organic PCMs (∼350 kJ/kg). This computational study suggests that, even in the case of H-bonded molecular crystals where the electrostatic energy contributes mainly to thermal storage density, the molecular distortion and van der Waals energies are also important factors to increase thermal storage density. In addition, the comparison between the three eight-carbon non-natural sugar alcohol isomers indicates that the selection of preferable isomers is also essential for large thermal storage density.