This book, a consecutive contribution to the series Challenges and Advances in Computational Chemistry and Physics, focuses on understanding the photoinduced processes in biological systems. Understanding and fine control of light fate in molecules is vital for the progress of society and environmental safety. Light induced changes of various physico-chemical and spectroscopic properties in nucleic acids and proteins is the basis of fundamental biological events such as vision, DNA photodamage or photosensing. The investigation of these processes is challenging to both theoretical and experimental studies. This volume encompasses the quantum mechanics/molecular mechanics theory in several subfields, including: advanced computational methods for nucleic acids and proteins systems; dynamics, spectroscopic and physico-chemical properties of biological photoreceptors; DNA photodamage. This book is of interest to readers in both fundamental and application-oriented research by overviewing recent achievements in computational modeling of excited states in nucleic acids and proteins.

This volume presents the current status of software development in the field of computational and theoretical chemistry and gives an overview of the emerging trends. The challenges of maintaining the legacy codes and their adaptation to the rapidly growing hardware capabilities and the new programming environments are surveyed in a series of topical reviews written by the core developers and maintainers of the popular quantum chemistry and molecular dynamics programs. Special emphasis is given to new computational methodologies and practical aspects of their implementation and application in the computational chemistry codes. Modularity of the computational chemistry software is an emerging concept that enables to bypass the development and maintenance bottleneck of the legacy software and to customize the software using the best available computational procedures implemented in the form of self-contained modules. Perspectives on modular design of the computer programs for modeling molecular electronic structure, non-adiabatic dynamics, kinetics, as well as for data visualization are presented by the researchers actively working in the field of software development and application. This volume is of interest to quantum and computational chemists as well as experimental chemists actively using and developing computational software for their research. Chapters "MLatom 2: An Integrative Platform for Atomistic Machine Learning" and "Evolution of the Automatic Rhodopsin Modeling (ARM) Protocol" are available open access under a CC BY 4.0 License via link.springer.com.

Computational Photochemistry, Volume 16 provides an overview of general strategies currently used to investigate photochemical processes. Whilst contributing to establishing a branch of computational chemistry that deals with the properties and reactivity of photoexcited molecules, the book also provides insight into the conceptual and methodological research lines in computational photochemistry. Packed with examples of applications of modelling of basic photochemical reactions and the computer-aided development of novel materials in the field of photodegradation (paints), photoprotection (sunscreens), color regulation (photochromic devices) and fluorescent probes, this book is particularly useful to anyone interested in the effect of light on molecules and materials.
* Provides an overview of computational photochemistry, dealing with principles and applications
* Demonstrates techniques that can be used in the computer-aided design of novel photo responsive materials
* Written by experts in computational photochemistry

This book, a consecutive contribution to the series Challenges and Advances in Computational Chemistry and Physics, focuses on understanding the photoinduced processes in biological systems. Understanding and fine control of light fate in molecules is vital for the progress of society and environmental safety. Light induced changes of various physico-chemical and spectroscopic properties in nucleic acids and proteins is the basis of fundamental biological events such as vision, DNA photodamage or photosensing. The investigation of these processes is challenging to both theoretical and experimental studies. This volume encompasses the quantum mechanics/molecular mechanics theory in several subfields, including: advanced computational methods for nucleic acids and proteins systems; dynamics, spectroscopic and physico-chemical properties of biological photoreceptors; DNA photodamage. This book is of interest to readers in both fundamental and application-oriented research by overviewing recent achievements in computational modeling of excited states in nucleic acids and proteins.