Exploring chemistry with the fragment molecular orbital method

The fragment molecular orbital (FMO) method makes possible nearly linear scaling calculations of large molecular systems, such as water clusters, proteins and DNA. In particular, FMO has been widely used in biochemical applications involving protein-ligand binding and drug design. The method has been efficiently parallelized suitable for petascale computing. Many commonly used wave functions and solvent models have been interfaced with FMO. We review the historical background of FMO, and summarize its method development and applications.