Three-body expansion of the fragment molecular orbital method combined with density-functional tight-binding.

The three-body fragment molecular orbital (FMO3) method is formulated for density-functional tight-binding (DFTB). The energy, analytic gradient, and Hessian are derived in the gas phase, and the energy and analytic gradient are also derived for polarizable continuum model. The accuracy of FMO3-DFTB is evaluated for five proteins, sodium cation in explicit solvent, and three isomers of polyalanine. It is shown that FMO3-DFTB is considerably more accurate than FMO2-DFTB. Molecular dynamics simulations for sodium cation in water are performed for 100 ps, yielding radial distribution functions and coordination numbers. © 2017 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.