A fluctuating charge interaction potential function for alanine-water was constructed in the spirit of newly developed ABEEMax/MM（atom-bond electronegativity equalization method at the azc level fused into molecular mechanics）. The properties of gaseous neutral alanine-（H20）n（n=l--7） clusters were systematically investigated by quantum mechanics（QM） and the constructed ABEEMax/MM potential, such as conformations, hydrogen bonds （H-bonds）, interaction energies, charge distributions, and so on. The results of ABEEM^rrc/MM model are in fair agreement with those of QM and available experimental data. For isolated alanine, compared with those of experi- mental structure, the average absolute deviations（AAD） of bond length and bond angle are 0.002 nm and 1.4~, re- spectively. For alanine-water clusters, the AAD of interaction energies and H-bond lengths are only 3.77 kJ/mol and 0.012 nm, respectively, compared to the results of MP2/aug-cc-pVDZ//MP2/6-31 I＋G＊＊ method. The ABEEMa charges fluctuate with the changing conformation of the system, and can accurately and reasonably reflect the inter- polarization between water and alanine. The presented alanine-water potential function may provide a basis for fur- ther simulations on related aqueous solutions ofbiomolecules.
Ab initio MP2 and DFT studies on the tautomers of cytosine and the related hydrated tautomers have been carried out. The ground-state structures of four tautomers of cytosine and related transition states were fully optimized. The vibrational frequency analysis was performed on all the optimized structures. Detailed intrinsic reaction coordinate （IRC） calculations were carded out to guarantee the optimized transition-state structures being connected to the related tautomers. We obtained the relative stability order for the tautomers of cytosine and the related hydrated tautomers. In the isolated and hydrated condition, the bond types of C（2）--O（7） and C（4）--N（8） greatly affect the stability of the cytosine tautomers. Moreover, we have explored the influence of the water molecules on the intramolecular proton transfer between the keto and enol forms of the cytosine tautomers. The first water molecule obviously decreases the isomerization activation energy for the monohydrated cytosine tautomers. It is shown that the isomerization energy barrier changes only a little when the second and third water molecules are added in the reaction loop. The solvent effects have an obvious influence on the proton-transfer barrier of the isolated cytosine. However, the solvent effects seem to be insignificant for the isomerization energy barriers of the monohydrated, dihydrated and trihydrated cytosine. The water molecule in these complexes can be looked on as the explicit water. Therefore, the explicit water model may be more credible to explore the intramolecular proton transfer, in comparison with the PCM which is the implicit water model.
