We will comment not only on the strengths but also on the technical pitfalls and the current limitations of the technique, discussing the performance of DFT and the foreseeable achievements in the near future. Theoretical background To appreciate the special place of DFT in the modern arsenal of quantum chemical methods, it is useful first to have a look into selleck chemicals the more traditional wavefunction-based approaches. These attempt to provide approximate solutions to the Schrödinger equation,

the fundamental equation of quantum mechanics that describes any given chemical system. The most fundamental of these approaches originates from the pioneering work of Hartree and Fock in the 1920s (Szabo and Ostlund 1989). The HF

method assumes that the exact N-body wavefunction of the system find more can be approximated by a single Slater determinant of N spin-orbitals. By invoking the variational principle, one can derive a set of N-coupled equations for the N spin orbitals. Solution of these equations yields the Hartree–Fock wavefunction and energy of the system, which are upper-bound approximations of the exact ones. The main shortcoming of the HF method is that it treats electrons as if they were moving independently of each other; in other words, it neglects electron correlation. For this reason, the efficiency and simplicity of the HF method are offset by poor performance for systems of relevance to bioinorganic chemistry. Thus, HF is now principally used merely as a starting Adenosine point for more elaborate “post-HF” ab initio quantum chemical approaches, such as coupled cluster or configuration interaction methods, which provide different ways of recovering the correlation missing from HF and approximating the exact wavefunction. Unfortunately, post-HF methods usually present difficulties in their application to bioinorganic and biological systems, and their cost is currently still prohibitive for molecules containing more than about 20 atoms. Density functional theory attempts to address both the inaccuracy

of HF and the high computational demands of post-HF methods by replacing the many-body electronic wavefunction with the electronic density as the basic quantity (Koch and Holthausen 2000; Parr and Yang 1989). Whereas the wavefunction of an N electron system is dependent on 3N variables (three spatial variables for each of the N electrons), the density is a function of only three variables and is a simpler quantity to deal with both conceptually and practically, while electron correlation is included in an indirect way from the outset. Modern DFT rests on two theorems by Hohenberg and Kohn (1964). The first theorem states that the ground-state electron density uniquely determines the electronic wavefunction and hence all ground-state properties of an electronic system.