Numerical atomic basis orbitals are variationally optimized for biological molecules such as proteins, polysaccharides, and deoxyribonucleic acid within a density functional theory. Based on a statistical treatment of results of a fully variational optimization of basis orbitals ( full optimized basis orbitals) for 43 biological model molecules, simple sets of preoptimized basis orbitals classified under the local chemical environment (simple preoptimized basis orbitals) are constructed for hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorous, and sulfur atoms, each of which contains double valence plus polarization basis function. For a wide variety of molecules we show that the simple preoptimized orbitals provide well convergent energy and physical quantities comparable to those calculated by the full optimized orbitals, which demonstrates that the simple preoptimized orbitals possess substantial transferability for biological molecules.(C) 2004 American Institute of Physics.