Density Functional Calculations of 55Mn, 14N and 13C Electron Paramagnetic Resonance Parameters Support an Energetically Feasible Model System for the S2 State of the Oxygen‐Evolving Complex of Photosystem II

Metal and ligand hyperfine couplings of a previously suggested, energetically feasible Mn₄Ca model cluster ( SG2009^?1 ) for the S₂ state of the oxygen‐evolving complex (OEC) of photosystem II (PSII) have been studied by broken‐symmetry density functional methods and compared with other suggested structural and spectroscopic models. This was carried out explicitly for different spin‐coupling patterns of the S=1/2 ground state of the Mn^III(Mn^IV)₃ cluster. By applying spin‐projection techniques and a scaling of the manganese hyperfine couplings, computation of the hyperfine and nuclear quadrupole coupling parameters allows a direct evaluation of the proposed models in comparison with data obtained from the simulation of EPR, ENDOR, and ESEEM spectra. The computation of ⁵⁵Mn hyperfine couplings (HFCs) for SG2009^?1 gives excellent agreement with experiment. However, at the current level of spin projection, the ⁵⁵Mn HFCs do not appear sufficiently accurate to distinguish between different structural models. Yet, of all the models studied, SG2009^?1 is the only one with the Mn^III site at the Mn_C center, which is coordinated by histidine (D1‐His332). The computed histidine ¹⁴N HFC anisotropy for SG2009^?1 gives much better agreement with ESEEM data than the other models, in which Mn_C is an Mn^IV site, thus supporting the validity of the model. The ¹³C HFCs of various carboxylates have been compared with ¹³C ENDOR data for PSII preparations with ¹³C‐labelled alanine.