DFT calculations for the hydrogen transfer reaction in Bis(μ-oxo) dicopper-enzyme

Metals have often played important roles to some enzymatic reactions that are essential to biological processes. Therefore many scientists have studied the reaction mechanisms of catalytic reactions in metaloenzymes for many years. Methane MonoOxygenase (MMO) is an enzyme that oxidize methane to methyl alcohol. Recently Tolman et al. studied a model reaction for MMO, which is a hydroxide transfer reaction in Bis-(μ-oxo)-dicopper complex, and suggested several possible mechanisms. Later a two-step mechanism, which is hydrogen transfer followed by hydroxide rebound, was proposed from theoretical studies. In this study we calculated the reactant, product, and the transition state structures, and energetics of the first hydrogen transfer reaction using various DFT methods including recently developed the MO6 family of DFT, namely, MO6, MO6L, and MO6-2X. We found that the M06/6-31G(d,p)/LANL2DZ method reproduce the experimental XRD structure of reactants very well. The TS structures, barrier heights, and reaction energies depend very much on the size of the basis sets.