Ab initio and density functional theory modeling of the chiroptical response of glycine and alanine in solution using explicit solvation and molecular dynamics

We investigate ways in which simple point charge (SPC) water models can be used in place of more expensive quantum mechanical water molecules to efficiently model the solvent effect on a solute molecule's chiroptical responses. The effect that SPC waters have on the computed circular dichroism of a solvated glycine molecule are comparable to, albeit somewhat weaker than, that of quantum mechanical waters at the coupled cluster CC2 level of theory. The effects of SPC waters in fact correlate better with QM-CC2 waters than quantum mechanical waters computed with density functional theory (DFT) methods, since they do not promote spurious charge transfer excitations that are a known deficiency with most popular density functionals. Furthermore, the near zero order scaling of point charge waters allows multiple layers of explicit solvation to be modeled with negligible computational cost, which is not practical with CC2 or DFT levels. As a practical example, we model the molar rotations of glycine and alanine, and track their convergence.