RM1 semiempirical model: chemistry, pharmaceutical research, molecular biology and materials science

In this review, we show improvements to the semiempirical quantum chemical method RM1 and present a wide range of its applications as reported by researchers of various areas, such as theoretical, organic, physical, analytical, and inorganic chemistry, as well as their interfaces with medicinal chemistry, biology, and materials science. Success of RM1 is seemingly due to its ability to predict structural, energetic, electronic and wave function dependent properties of the investigated systems, coupled with its low computational demand required to perform calculations when compared to ab initio and density functional methods. Moreover, RM1 is widely available in several computational chemistry software, such as MOPAC, GAMESS, Amber, Spartan, HyperChem, and AMPAC. This review describes various case studies that perhaps can be of interest to researchers who might need a more solid basis from which to expand the frontier of applicability of RM1 to even more complex problems on larger systems. (author)