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Understanding the behavior of biomolecules such as proteins requires understanding the critical influence of the surrounding fluid (solvent) environment--water with mobile salt ions such as sodium. Unfortunately, for many studies, fully atomistic simulations of biomolecules, surrounded by thousands of water molecules and ions are too computationally slow. Continuum solvent models based on macroscopic dielectric theory (e.g. the Poisson equation) are popular alternatives, but their simplicity fails to capture well-known phenomena of functional significance. For example, standard theories predict that electrostatic response is symmetric with respect to the sign of an atomic charge, even though response is in fact strongly asymmetric if the charge is near the biomolecule surface. In this work, we present an asymmetric continuum theory that captures the essential physical mechanism--the finite size of solvent atoms--using a nonlinear boundary condition (NLBC) at the dielectric interface between the biomolecule and solvent. Numerical calculations using boundary-integral methods demonstrate that the new NLBC model reproduces a wide range of results computed by more realistic, and expensive, all-atom molecular-dynamics (MD) simulations in explicit water. We discuss model extensions such as modeling dilute-electrolyte solvents with Debye-Huckel theory (the linearized Poisson-Boltzmann equation) and opportunities for the electromagnetics community to contribute to research in this important area of molecular nanoscience and engineering.
The structure and function of biological molecules are strongly influenced by the water and dissolved ions that surround them. This aqueous solution (solvent) exerts significant electrostatic forces in response to the biomolecules ubiquitous atomic c
Continuum solvation methods can provide an accurate and inexpensive embedding of quantum simulations in liquid or complex dielectric environments. Notwithstanding a long history and manifold applications to isolated systems in open boundary condition
Molecular dynamics simulations of biomolecules have been widely adopted in biomedical studies. As classical point-charge models continue to be used in routine biomolecular applications, there have been growing demands on developing polarizable force
Electrostatic forces play many important roles in molecular biology, but are hard to model due to the complicated interactions between biomolecules and the surrounding solvent, a fluid composed of water and dissolved ions. Continuum model have been s
In this paper we extend the familiar continuum electrostatic model with a perturbation to the usual macroscopic boundary condition. The perturbation is based on the mean spherical approximation (MSA), to derive a multiscale hydration-shell boundary c