[gmx-developers] implicit solvent free energy

[David van der Spoel]

On 2013-08-30 01:47, David Mobley wrote:
> Dear Devs,
>
> I wanted to get a sense how many people are interested in getting the
> implicit solvent and free energy codes playing nice together, and how
> likely it is to happen.
>
> We're very interested in this, as we do a lot of work related to free
> energy methodology. This means in general we are more interested in
> whether something works (and how well it works) given the force field
> parameters than we are in having the solvent model right. In general,
> implicit solvent will run a lot faster, so we could do a lot of our work
> much more quickly if the free energy code would work well with implicit
> solvent (such as generalized Born, etc.). We've also seen enough work on
> implicit solvent free energy calculations elsewhere (and done some
> ourself in AMBER) to be optimistic about the accuracies we could achieve
> for a number of the problems we're interested in.
>
> In any case:
> - Are other people similarly interested in this?
> - Are there any efforts underway to get the GB code to work properly
> with free energy?
> - What are the problems/obstacles?
>

First problem is that GB does not work at all anymore in 4.6 and higher 
(correct me if I'm wrong). There are some loops missing IIRC. Maybe you 
could look into this if you're interested.

Since I am rather skeptical about GB due to its approximate nature I am 
not sure that it is worth the trouble. You would have to compute the 
derivative of the GB term with respect to the born radius, right? The 
manual in section 3.18 is not entirely complete, but that might be 
tedious and expensive to compute as well.

> Thanks!
> David
>
>
> --
> David Mobley
> dmobley at gmail.com <mailto:dmobley at gmail.com>
> 949-385-2436
>
>


-- 
David van der Spoel, Ph.D., Professor of Biology
Dept. of Cell & Molec. Biol., Uppsala University.
Box 596, 75124 Uppsala, Sweden. Phone:	+46184714205.
spoel at xray.bmc.uu.se    http://folding.bmc.uu.se