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Updated: May 19, 2026

Synthesizing Amino Acids Modified with Reactive Carbonyls in Silico to Assess Structural Effects Using Molecular Dynamics Simulations
Published on: April 26, 2024
Comparison of some dispersion-corrected and traditional functionals as applied to peptides and conformations of
Mateusz Marianski1, Amparo Asensio, J J Dannenberg
1Department of Chemistry, City University of New York - Hunter College and the Graduate School, 695 Park Avenue, New York, New York 10065, USA.
Abstract:
We compare the energetic and structural properties of fully optimized α-helical and antiparallel β-sheet polyalanines and the energetic differences between axial and equatorial conformations of three cyclohexane derivatives (methyl, fluoro, and chloro) as calculated using several functionals designed to treat dispersion (B97-D, ωB97x-D, M06, M06L, and M06-2X) with other traditional functionals not specifically parametrized to treat dispersion (B3LYP, X3LYP, and PBE1PBE) and with experimental results. Those functionals developed to treat dispersion significantly overestimate interaction enthalpies of folding for the α-helix and predict unreasonable structures that contain Ramachandran φ and ψ and C = O...N H-bonding angles that are out of the bounds of databases compiled the β-sheets. These structures are consistent with overestimation of the interaction energies. For the cyclohexanes, these functionals overestimate the stabilities of the axial conformation, especially when used with smaller basis sets. Their performance improves when the basis set is improved from D95∗∗ to aug-cc-pVTZ (which would not be possible with systems as large as the peptides).
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