The
effective fragment potential (EFP) approach, which can be described
as a nonempirical polarizable force field, affords an accurate first-principles
treatment of noncovalent interactions in extended systems. EFP can
also describe the effect of the environment on the electronic properties
(e.g., electronic excitation energies and ionization and electron-attachment
energies) of a subsystem via the QM/EFP (quantum mechanics/EFP) polarizable
embedding scheme. The original formulation of the method assumes that
the system can be separated, without breaking covalent bonds, into
closed-shell fragments, such as solvent and solute molecules. Here,
we present an extension of the EFP method to macromolecules (mEFP).
Several schemes for breaking a large molecule into small fragments
described by EFP are presented and benchmarked. We focus on the electronic
properties of molecules embedded into a protein environment and consider
ionization, electron-attachment, and excitation energies (single-point
calculations only). The model systems include chromophores of green
and red fluorescent proteins surrounded by several nearby amino acid
residues and phenolate bound to the T4 lysozyme. All mEFP schemes
show robust performance and accurately reproduce the reference full
QM calculations. For further applications of mEFP, we recommend either
the scheme in which the peptide is cut along the C<sub>α</sub>–C bond, giving rise to one fragment per amino acid, or the
scheme with two cuts per amino acid, along the C<sub>α</sub>–C and C<sub>α</sub>–N bonds. While using these
fragmentation schemes, the errors in solvatochromic shifts in electronic
energy differences (excitation, ionization, electron detachment, or
electron-attachment) do not exceed 0.1 eV. The largest error of QM/mEFP
against QM/EFP (no fragmentation of the EFP part) is 0.06 eV (in most
cases, the errors are 0.01–0.02 eV). The errors in the QM/molecular
mechanics calculations with standard point charges can be as large
as 0.3 eV