Performance of Density-Functional Tight-Binding in Comparison to Ab Initio and First-Principles Methods for Isomer Geometries and Energies of Glucose Epimers in Vacuo and Solution

[Image: see text] Density functional theory (DFT) is a widely used methodology for the computation of molecular and electronic structure, and we confirm that B3LYP and the high-level ab initio G3B3 method are in excellent agreement for the lowest-energy isomers of the 16 glucose epimers. Density-functional tight-binding (DFTB) is an approximate version of DFT with typically comparable accuracy that is 2 to 3 orders of magnitude faster, therefore generally very suitable for processing large numbers of complex structures. Conformational isomerism in sugars is well known to give rise to a large number of isomer structures. On the basis of a comprehensive study of glucose epimers in vacuo and aqueous solution, we found that the performance of DFTB is on par to B3LYP in terms of geometrical parameters excluding hydrogen bonds and isomer energies. However, DFTB underestimates both hydrogen bonding interactions as well as torsional barriers associated with rotations of the hydroxy groups, resulting in a counterintuitive overemphasis of hydrogen bonding in both gas phase as well as in water. Although the associated root mean squared deviation from B3LYP within epimer isomer groups is only on the order of 1 kcal/mol, this deviation affects the correct assignment of major isomer ordering, which span less than 10 kcal/mol. Both second- as well as third-order DFTB methods are exhibiting similar deviations from B3LYP. Even after the inclusion of empirical dispersion corrections in vacuum, these deviations remain for a large majority of isomer energies and geometries when compared to dispersion-corrected B3LYP.