J. Phys. Chem., 100 (42), 17011 -17020 jp9614658 S0022-3654(96)01465-7

Copyright © 1996 by the American Chemical Society

Effect of Electrostatic Force Truncation on Interfacial and Transport Properties of Water

Scott E. Feller and Richard W. Pastor

Biophysics Laboratory, Center for Biologics Evaluation & Research, Food & Drug Administration, Rockville, Maryland 20852-1448

Atipat Rojnuckarin

Department of Chemical Engineering, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison Wisconsin 53706

Stephen Bogusz

Department of Gastroenterology, Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, Washington, DC 20307

Bernard R. Brooks*

Laboratory of Structural Biology, Division of Computer Research & Technology, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland 20892

Received: May 21, 1996

In Final Form: August 2, 1996

Abstract:

The importance of accurately accounting for all Coulombic forces in molecular dynamics simulations of water at interfaces is demonstrated by comparing the Ewald summation technique with various spherical truncation methods. The increased structure induced by truncation methods at 12 Å leads to water/vapor surface tensions and surface potentials that are respectively 50% and 100% greater than obtained with Ewald. The orientational polarization of water at the lipid/water interface is analyzed within the Marcelja-Radic theory of the hydration force, yielding decay parameters of 2.6 and 1.8 Å for spherical truncation and Ewald, respectively, as compared with 1.7-2.1 Å obtained from experiment. Bulk water transport properties such as the viscosity and diffusion constants differ by as much as 100% between simulations carried out with and without truncation; this may be related to ordering in the neighborhood of the cutoff radius. The diffusion constant calculated from the Ewald simulation is significantly further from experiment than the cutoff result, pointing out the need to reparametrize the TIP3P water model for use with Ewald summation. Appendices describe a method for carrying out the Ewald summation on a distributed memory parallel computer and other computational details relevant when simulating large systems.

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