Molecular Mechanics - Environment and Solvation

Environment and Solvation

There are several ways of defining the environment surrounding the molecule or molecules of interest in molecular mechanics. A system can be simulated in vacuum (known as a gas-phase simulation) with no surrounding environment at all, but this is usually not desirable because it introduces artifacts in the molecular geometry, especially in charged molecules. Surface charges that would ordinarily interact with solvent molecules instead interact with each other, producing molecular conformations that are unlikely to be present in any other environment. The "best" way to solvate a system is to place explicit water molecules in the simulation box with the molecules of interest and treat the water molecules as interacting particles like those in the molecule. A variety of water models exist with increasing levels of complexity, representing water as a simple hard sphere (a united-atom approach), as three separate particles with fixed bond angles, or even as four or five separate interaction centers to account for unpaired electrons on the oxygen atom. Unsurprisingly, the more complex the water model, the more computationally intensive the simulation. A compromise approach has been found in implicit solvation, which replaces the explicitly represented water molecules with a mathematical expression that reproduces the average behavior of water molecules (or other solvents such as lipids). This method is useful for preventing artifacts that arise from vacuum simulations and reproduces bulk solvent properties well, but cannot reproduce situations in which individual water molecules have interesting interactions with the molecules under study.