Search

Born-Oppenheimer molecular dynamics (BOMD) in combination with density functional theory, augmented with a damped empirical dispersion term, has been used to study the behavior of dilauroyl phosphatidylcholine (DLPC) isomers with temperature. In contrast to dimyristoyl phosphatidylcholine (DMPC), the BOMD results show the presence of various conformations at different temperatures. The molecular order-disorder process, quantified by the distance-fluctuation criterion as a function of temperature, is characterized by two transitions. This is in line with the known two-phase transitions of DLPC bilayers, involving trans to gauche conformational changes in the alkane chains. The different temperature dependence of the DLPC and DMPC molecules suggests that the experimentally observed unusual dynamics of DLPC bilayers compared to that of longer chain lipids is governed to a large extent by the intramolecular dynamics. A first-principles methodology applied at the molecular level can thus be an appropriate tool for microscopic analysis of the order-disorder transitions, which are related to the molecular structural transformations within large assemblies. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sum-over-states density functional perturbation theory (SOS-DFPT) (Malkin, V. G.; Malkina, O. L.; Casida, M. E.; Salahub, D. R. J Am Chem Soc 1994, 116, 5898) has been successful as a method for calculating nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) chemical shifts. The key to this success is the introduction of an ad hoc correction to the excitation energies represented by simple orbital energy differences in uncoupled density functional theory. It has been suggested (Jamorski, C.; Casida, M. E.; Salahub, D. R. J Chem Phys 1996, 104, 5134) that the good performance of this methodology could be partly explained by the resemblance of the corrected excitation energy to the orbital energy difference given by time-dependent density functional theory (TDDFT). In fact, according to exact (wave function) time-dependent perturbation theory, both magnetic and electric perturbations may be described using essentially the same simple SOS expression. However in adiabatic TDDFT, with no explicit relativistic or current density functional dependence, the functional is approximate and so the magnetic and electric SOS expressions are different. Because TDDFT (neglecting relativistic and current density functional dependence) is formally exact for electric perturbations but not magnetic perturbations and because the two SOS expressions should have the same form, we propose that the SOS expression for electric perturbations should also be used for magnetic perturbations. We then go on to realize our theory by deriving a “Loc.3” approximation that is explicitly designed by applying the electric field SOS expression to magnetic fields within the two-level model and Tamm–Dancoff approximation. Test results for 13 small organic and inorganic molecules show that the Loc.3 approximation performs at least as well as the “Loc.1” and “Loc.2” approximations of SOS-DFPT. © 2002 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Int J Quantum Chem, 2003 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]