Development of ReaxFF Reactive Force Field for Aqueous Iron-Sulfur Clusters with Applications to Stability and Reactivity in Water

E Moerman and D Furman and DJ Wales, JOURNAL OF CHEMICAL INFORMATION AND MODELING, 61, 1204-1214 (2021).

DOI: 10.1021/acs.jcim.0c01292

Iron-sulfur clusters serve unique roles in biochemistry, geochemistry, and renewable energy technologies. However, a full theoretical understanding of their structures and properties is still lacking. To facilitate large-scale reactive molecular dynamics simulations of iron- sulfur clusters in aqueous environments, a ReaxFF reactive force field is developed, based on an extensive set of quantum chemical calculations. This force field compares favorably with the reference calculations on gas-phase species and significantly improves on a previous ReaxFF parametrization. We employ the new potential to study the stability and reactivity of iron-sulfur clusters in explicit water with constant-temperature reactive molecular dynamics. The aqueous species exhibit a dynamic, temperature-dependent behavior, in good agreement with previous much more costly ab initio simulations.

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