Convergence process with quasi-canonical localized orbital in all-electron SCF calculation on proteins

A convergence process with a new type of localized orbital (LO) is proposed for self-consistent field (SCF) molecular orbital (MO) calculations on proteins. Recently, an all-electron density functional (DF) calculation on cytochrome c was achieved by a convergence method in which the initial electron density of a peptide was constructed by linking the electron density of small peptides. However, its convergence was slow and insufficient in SCF calculations for long peptides. In this paper a new kind of LO called the ‘quasi-canonical localized orbital (QCLO)’ is formulated and a computational process with QCLOs is proposed to improve the SCF convergence. The QCLO is localized in a certain region of a molecule, but it is also the canonical MO of the region. In test calculations on a seven-residue peptide, the error in the initial total energy calculated with QCLOs was about one twentieth of that by cut and paste of the electron density, and the number of SCF iterations was reduced markedly. Future applications of QCLO to big and complex molecules are also discussed.