Authors: Suhwan Song, Stefan Vuckovic, Youngsam Kim, Hayoung Yu, Eunji Sim, Kieron Burke
Published: 2023-02-13
DOI: 10.1038/s41467-023-36094-y
Source: Full article
AbstractDensity functional simulations of condensed phase water are typically inaccurate, due to the inaccuracies of approximate functionals. A recent breakthrough showed that the SCAN approximation can yield chemical accuracy for pure water in all its phases, but only when its density is corrected. This is a crucial step toward first-principles biosimulations. However, weak dispersion forces are ubiquitous and play a key role in noncovalent interactions among biomolecules, but are not included in the new approach. Moreover, naïve inclusion of dispersion in HF-SCAN ruins its high accuracy for pure water. Here we show that systematic application of the principles of density-corrected DFT yields a functional (HF-r2SCAN-DC4) which recovers and not only improves over HF-SCAN for pure water, but also captures vital noncovalent interactions in biomolecules, making it suitable for simulations of solutions.