Efficient Strategy for the Calculation of Solvation Free Energies in Water and Chloroform at the Quantum Mechanical/Molecular Mechanical Level

The partitioning of solute molecules between immiscible solvents with significantly different polarities is of great importance. The polarization between the solute and solvent molecules plays an essential role in determining the solubility of the solute, which makes computational studies utilizing molecular mechanics (MM) rather difficult. In contrast, quantum mechanics (QM) can provide more reliable predictions. In this work, the partition coefficients of the side chain analogs of some amino acids between water and chloroform were computed. The QM solvation free energies were calculated indirectly via a series of MM states using the multistate Bennett acceptance ratio (MBAR) and the MM-to-QM corrections were applied at the two endpoints using thermodynamic perturbation (TP). Previously, it has been shown (Jia et al. J. Chem. Theory Comput. 2016, 12, 499–511) that this method provides the minimal variance in the results without running QM simulations. However, if there is insufficient overlap in phase sp...