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The flexibility of metal–organic frameworks (MOFs) affects their gas adsorption and diffusion properties. However, reliable force fields for simulating flexible MOFs are lacking. As a result, most atomistic simulations so far have been carried out assuming rigid MOFs, which inevitably overestimates the gas adsorption energy. Here, we show that this issue can be addressed by applying a machine-learning potential, trained on quantum chemistry data, to atomistic simulations. We find that inclusion of flexibility is particularly important for simulating CO2 chemisorption in MOFs with coordinatively unsaturated metal sites. Specifically, we demonstrate that the diffusion of CO2 in a flexible Mg-MOF-74 structure is about one order of magnitude faster than in a rigid one, challenging the rigid-MOF assumption in previous simulations. 

Intercalating ds-DNA/RNA with small molecules can play an essential role in controlling the electron transmission probability for molecular electronics applications such as biosensors, single-molecule transistors, and data storage. However, its applications are limited due to a lack of understanding the nature of intercalation and electron transport mechanisms. We addressed this long-standing problem by studying the effect of intercalation on both the molecular structure and charge transport along the nucleic acids using molecular dynamics simulations and first-principle calculations coupled with Green’s function method, respectively. The study on anthraquinone and anthraquinone-neomycin conjugate intercalation into short nucleic acids reveals some universal features: 1) the intercalation affects the transmission by two mechanisms: a) inducing energy levels within the bandgap and b) shifting the location of the Fermi energy with respect to the molecular orbitals of the nucleic acid, 2) the effect of intercalation was found to be dependent on the redox state of the intercalator: while oxidized anthraquinone decreases, reduced anthraquinone increases the conductance, and 3) the sequence of intercalated nucleic acid further affects the transmission: lowering the AT-region length was found to enhance the electronic coupling of the intercalator with GC bases, hence yielding an increase of more than four times in conductance. We anticipate our study to inspire designing intercalator-nucleic acid complexes for potential use in molecular electronics via creating a multi-level gating effect.