A simple and efficient dispersion correction to the Hartree–Fock theory

Abstract

One of the most challenging problems in computational chemistry and in drug discovery is the accurate prediction of the binding energy between a ligand and a protein receptor. It is well known that the binding energy calculated with the Hartree–Fock molecular orbital theory (HF) lacks the dispersion interaction energy that significantly affects the accuracy of the total binding energy of a large molecular system. We propose a simple and efficient dispersion energy correction to the HF theory (HF-Dtq). The performance of HF-Dtq was compared with those of several recently proposed dispersion corrected density functional theory methods (DFT-Ds) as to the binding energies of 68 small non-covalent complexes. The overall performance of HF-Dtq was found to be nearly equivalent to that of more sophisticated B3LYP-D3. HF-Dtq will thus be a useful and powerful method for accurately predicting the binding energy between a ligand and a protein, albeit it is a simple correction procedure based on HF.