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The suitability of a hybrid density functional to qualitatively reproduce geometric and energetic details of parallel pi-stacked aromatic complexes is presented. The hybrid functional includes an ad hoc mixture of half the exact (HF) exchange with half of the uniform electron gas exchange, plus Lee, Yang, and Parr's expression for correlation energy. This functional, in combination with polarized, diffuse basis sets, gives a binding energy for the parallel-displaced benzene dimer in good agreement with the best available high-level calculations reported in the literature, and qualitatively reproduces the local MP2 potential energy surface of the parallel-displaced benzene dimer. This method was further critically compared to high-level calculations recently reported in the literature for a range of pi-stacked complexes, including monosubstituted benzene-benzene dimers, along with DNA and RNA bases, and generally agrees with MP2 and/or CCSD(T) results to within +/-2 kJ mol(-1). We also show that the resulting BH&H binding energy is closely related to the electron density in the intermolecular region. The net result is that the BH&H functional, presumably due to fortuitous cancellation of errors, provides a pragmatic, computationally efficient quantum mechanical tool for the study of large pi-stacked systems such as DNA.

The ability of functional groups to act as hydrogen bond acids and bases can be obtained from either equilibrium constants for 1:1 hydrogen bonding or overall hydrogen bond constants. Either method leads to structural constants for hydrogen bonding that in some way are analogous to substituent constants. Extensive lists of these functional group constants are reported. It is shown that those derived from overall hydrogen bond constants are the more useful in analyses of physicochemical and biochemical properties.

New scaling parameters are presented for use in the spin-component scaled (SCS) variant of density fitted local second-order Møller-Plesset perturbation theory (DF-LMP2) that have been optimized for use in evaluating the interaction energy between nucleic acid base pairs. The optimal set of parameters completely neglects the contribution from antiparallel-spin electron pairs to the MP2 energy while scaling the parallel contribution by 1.76. These spin-component scaled for nucleobases (SCSN) parameters are obtained by minimizing, with respect to SCS parameters, the rms interaction energy error relative to the best available literature values, over a set of ten stacked nucleic acid base pairs. The applicability of this scaling to a wide variety of noncovalent interactions is verified through evaluation of a larger set of model complexes, including those dominated by dispersion and electrostatics.