We present a computational analysis of the asymmetry in reaction center models of photosystem I, photosystem II, and bacteria from <i>Synechococcus elongatus</i>, <i>Thermococcus vulcanus</i>, and <i>Rhodobacter sphaeroides</i>, respectively. The recently developed FDE-diab methodology [J. Chem. Phys., 148 (2018), 214104] allowed us to effectively avoid the spin-density overdelocalization error characteristic for standard Kohn–Sham Density Functional Theory and to reliably calculate spin-density distributions and electronic couplings for a number of molecular systems ranging from dimeric models in vacuum to large protein including up to about 2000 atoms. The calculated spin densities showed a good agreement with available experimental results and were used to validate reaction center models reported in the literature. We demonstrated that the applied theoretical approach is very sensitive to changes in molecular structures and relative orientation of molecules. This makes FDE-diab a valuable tool for electronic structure calculations of large photosynthetic models effectively complementing the existing experimental techniques.
A unique photosynthetic reaction center from Heliobacterium chlorum
