Recently, we have proposed the fragment molecular orbital (FMO) method. an approximate MO method for calculating large molecules such as proteins. The method has been shown to reproduce ab initio total energies and geometries of molecules in good accuracy. The most time consuming part in the method, the calculations of environmental electrostatic potentials, were speeded up by employing the Mulliken approximation for two-electron integrals and a fractional point charge approximation. Numerical calculations on several polypeptides revealed that the approximations brought no significant loss of accuracy in the total energy of molecules and were of practical use. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.