Alcohols, ethers, carbohydrates, and related compounds. IV. Carbohydrates

Ab initio calculations [B3LYP/6-311 + +G(2d,2p)] have been carried out on 84 conformations of 12 different sugars (hexoses), in both pyranose and furanose forms, with the idea of generating a data base for carbohydrate structural energies that may be used for developing the predictive value of molecular mechanics calculations for carbohydrates. The average value for the apparent gas phase anomeric effect for a series of 31 pairs of pyranose conformations was found to be 1.83 kcal/mol (vs. 2.67 kcal/mol with a smaller basis set used in earlier calculations). In developing MM4 to reproduce these data, it was necessary first to have good energies for simple alcohols and ethers, together with an adequate treatment of hydrogen bonding, and then to include the anomeric effect, and the ethylene glycol type system, as was previously recognized. It was also found that the so-called delta-2 effect, long recognized in carbohydrates, must be explicitly included, in order to obtain acceptable results. When a force field that included all of these items as developed from the small molecules based on the MM4 hydrocarbon force field was applied without any parameter adjustment to the set of hexopyranose and furanose conformations mentioned earlier, the E-beta - E-alpha was found to have an average value of 1.88 kcal/mol, versus 1.74 for the quantum calculations. The signed average and RMS deviations of the MM4 from the QM results were +0.15 and 0.87 kcal/mol. (C) 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.