A new classical empirical potential is proposed for water. The model uses a polarizable atomic multipole description of electrostatic interactions. Multipoles through the quadrupole are assigned to each atomic center based on a distributed multipole analysis (DMA) derived from large basis set molecular orbital calculations on the water monomer. Polarization is treated via self-consistent induced atomic dipoles. A modified version of Thole's interaction model is used to damp induction at short range. Repulsion-dispersion (vdW) effects are computed from a buffered 14-7 potential. In a departure from most current water potentials, we find that significant vdW parameters are necessary on hydrogen as well as oxygen. The new potential is fully flexible and has been tested versus a variety of experimental data and quantum calculations for small clusters, liquid water, and ice. Overall, excellent agreement with experimental and high level ab initio results is obtained for numerous properties, including cluster structures and energetics and bulk thermodynamic and structural measures. The parametrization scheme described here is easily extended to other molecular systems, and the resulting water potential should provide a useful explicit solvent model for organic solutes and biopolymer modeling. IntroductionEmpirical potential energy functions derived from classical molecular mechanics are central to computational modeling at the atomic level. Molecular mechanics has long enjoyed great success in application to many classes of isolated, gas-phase organic compounds. 1 Beginning with the pioneering work of Bernal and Fowler, 2 water has probably been the target of more potential energy models than any other substance. An interesting overview and historical perspective on the development of water models was recently presented by Finney. 3 Simple nonpolarizable pairwise-additive models that describe the average structure and energetics of liquid water have been in wide use for many years (e.g., TIP3P 4 and SPC 5 ). The recently developed TIP5P potential exhibits excellent agreement with the experimental internal energy, density, and O‚‚‚O radial distribution at room temperature. 6 These models typically use fixed atom-based partial charges to model electrostatics and include polarization response to the environment only in an averaged, mean-field sense. As a result, nonpolarizable potentials that provide excellent descriptions of the homogeneous bulk phase are poor models for gas phase clusters and for nonpolar solutes in polar solvents. For example, the gas phase binding energy of the water dimer is overestimated by more than 30% in the TIP5P model. In application to large biomolecular systems, there is concern that such models cannot correctly account for situations where the same nonpolarizable moiety is exposed to different electrostatic environments, either within a single large static structure or during a course of simulation. In addition, there is an inherent inconsistency in most nonpolarizable models related to thei...

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Molecular force fields have been approaching a generational transition over the past several years, moving away from well-established and well-tuned, but intrinsically limited, fixed point charge models towards more intricate and expensive polarizable models that should allow more accurate description of molecular properties. The recently introduced AMOEBA force field is a leading publicly available example of this next generation of theoretical model, but to date has only received relatively limited validation, which we address here. We show that the AMOEBA force field is in fact a significant improvement over fixed charge models for small molecule structural and thermodynamic observables in particular, although further fine-tuning is necessary to describe solvation free energies of drug-like small molecules, dynamical properties away from ambient conditions, and possible improvements in aromatic interactions. State of the art electronic structure calculations reveal generally very good agreement with AMOEBA for demanding problems such as relative conformational energies of the alanine tetrapeptide and isomers of water sulfate complexes. AMOEBA is shown to be especially successful on protein-ligand binding and computational X-ray crystallography where polarization and accurate electrostatics are critical.

Development of the AMOEBA (Atomic Multipole Optimized Energetics for Biomolecular Simulation) force field for proteins is presented. The current version (AMOEBA-2013) utilizes permanent electrostatic multipole moments through the quadrupole at each atom, and explicitly treats polarization effects in various chemical and physical environments. The atomic multipole electrostatic parameters for each amino acid residue type are derived from high-level gas phase quantum mechanical calculations via a consistent and extensible protocol. Molecular polarizability is modeled via a Thole-style damped interactive induction model based upon distributed atomic polarizabilities. Inter- and intramolecular polarization is treated in a consistent fashion via the Thole model. The intramolecular polarization model ensures transferability of electrostatic parameters among different conformations, as demonstrated by the agreement between QM and AMOEBA electrostatic potentials, and dipole moments of dipeptides. The backbone and side chain torsional parameters were determined by comparing to gas-phase QM (RI-TRIM MP2/CBS) conformational energies of dipeptides and to statistical distributions from the Protein Data Bank. Molecular dynamics simulations are reported for short peptides in explicit water to examine their conformational properties in solution. Overall the calculated conformational free energies and J-coupling constants are consistent with PDB statistics and experimental NMR results, respectively. In addition, the experimental crystal structures of a number of proteins are well maintained during molecular dynamics (MD) simulation. While further calculations are necessary to fully validate the force field, initial results suggest the AMOEBA polarizable multipole force field is able to describe the structure and energetics of peptides and proteins, in both gas-phase and solution environments.

Thermodynamic measurements of the solvation of salts and electrolytes are relatively straightforward, but it is not possible to separate total solvation free energies into distinct cation and anion contributions without reference to an additional extrathermodynamic assumption. The present work attempts to resolve this difficulty using molecular dynamics simulations with the AMOEBA polarizable force field and perturbation techniques to directly compute absolute solvation free energies for potassium, sodium, and chloride ions in liquid water and formamide. Corresponding calculations are also performed with two widely used nonpolarizable force fields. The simulations with the polarizable force field accurately reproduce in vacuo quantum mechanical results, experimental ion-cluster solvation enthalpies, and experimental solvation free energies for whole salts, while the other force fields do not. The results indicate that calculations with a polarizable force field can capture the thermodynamics of ion solvation and that the solvation free energies of the individual ions differ by several kilocalories from commonly cited values.