Alkali (Li⁺, Na⁺, K⁺, Rb⁺, and Cs⁺) and halide (F⁻, Cl⁻, Br⁻, and I⁻) ions play an important role in many biological phenomena, roles that range from stabilization of biomolecular structure, to influence on biomolecular dynamics, to key physiological influence on homeostasis and signaling. To properly model ionic interaction and stability in atomistic simulations of biomolecular structure, dynamics, folding, catalysis, and function, an accurate model or representation of the monovalent ions is critically necessary. A good model needs to simultaneously reproduce many properties of ions, including their structure, dynamics, solvation, and moreover both the interactions of these ions with each other in the crystal and in solution and the interactions of ions with other molecules. At present, the best force fields for biomolecules employ a simple additive, nonpolarizable, and pairwise potential for atomic interaction. In this work, we describe our efforts to build better models of the monovalent ions within the pairwise Coulombic and 6-12 Lennard-Jones framework, where the models are tuned to balance crystal and solution properties in Ewald simulations with specific choices of well-known water models. Although it has been clearly demonstrated that truly accurate treatments of ions will require inclusion of nonadditivity and polarizability (particularly with the anions) and ultimately even a quantum mechanical treatment, our goal was to simply push the limits of the additive treatments to see if a balanced model could be created. The applied methodology is general and can be extended to other ions and to polarizable force-field models. Our starting point centered on observations from long simulations of biomolecules in salt solution with the AMBER force fields where salt crystals formed well below their solubility limit. The likely cause of the artifact in the AMBER parameters relates to the naive mixing of the Smith and Dang chloride parameters with AMBER-adapted Åqvist cation parameters. To provide a more appropriate balance, we reoptimized the parameters of the Lennard-Jones potential for the ions and specific choices of water models. To validate and optimize the parameters, we calculated hydration free energies of the solvated ions and also lattice energies (LE) and lattice constants (LC) of alkali halide salt crystals. This is the first effort that systematically scans across the Lennard-Jones space (well depth and radius) while balancing ion properties like LE and LC across all pair combinations of the alkali ions and halide ions. The optimization across the entire monovalent series avoids systematic deviations. The ion parameters developed, optimized, and characterized were targeted for use with some of the most commonly used rigid and nonpolarizable water models, specifically TIP3P, TIP4P_EW, and SPC/E. In addition to well reproducing the solution and crystal properties, the new ion parameters well reproduce binding energies of the ions to water and the radii of the first hydration shells.

AmberTools is a free and open-source collection of programs used to set up, run, and analyze molecular simulations. The newer features contained within AmberTools23 are briefly described in this Application note.

The dynamic and energetic properties of the alkali and halide ions were calculated using molecular dynamics (MD) and free energy simulations with various different water and ion force fields including our recently developed water-model-specific ion parameters. The properties calculated were activity coefficients, diffusion coefficients, residence times of atomic pairs, association constants, and solubility. Through calculation of these properties, we can assess the validity and range of applicability of the simple pair potential models and better understand their limitations. Due to extreme computational demands, the activity coefficients were only calculated for a subset of the models. The results qualitatively agree with experiment. Calculated diffusion coefficients and residence times between cation−anion, water−cation, and water−anion showed differences depending on the choice of water and ion force field used. The calculated solubilities of the alkali−halide salts were generally lower than the true solubility of the salts. However, for both the TIP4P_EW and SPC/E water-model-specific ion parameters, solubility was reasonably well-reproduced. Finally, the correlations among the various properties led to the following conclusions: (1) The reliability of the ion force fields is significantly affected by the specific choice of water model. (2) Ion−ion interactions are very important to accurately simulate the properties, especially solubility. (3) The SPC/E and TIP4P_EW water-model-specific ion force fields are preferred for simulation in high salt environments compared to the other ion force fields.

The utility of molecular dynamics (MD) simulations to model biomolecular structure, dynamics, and interactions has witnessed enormous advances in recent years due to the availability of optimized MD software and access to significant computational power, including GPU multicore computing engines and other specialized hardware. This has led researchers to routinely extend conformational sampling times to the microsecond level and beyond. The extended sampling time has allowed the community not only to converge conformational ensembles through complete sampling but also to discover deficiencies and overcome problems with the force fields. Accuracy of the force fields is a key component, along with sampling, toward being able to generate accurate and stable structures of biopolymers. The Amber force field for nucleic acids has been used extensively since the 1990s, and multiple artifacts have been discovered, corrected, and reassessed by different research groups. We present a direct comparison of two of the most recent and state-of-the-art Amber force field modifications, bsc1 and OL15, that focus on accurate modeling of double-stranded DNA. After extensive MD simulations with five test cases and two different water models, we conclude that both modifications are a remarkable improvement over the previous bsc0 force field. Both force field modifications show better agreement when compared to experimental structures. To ensure convergence, the Drew–Dickerson dodecamer (DDD) system was simulated using 100 independent MD simulations, each extended to at least 10 μs, and the independent MD simulations were concatenated into a single 1 ms long trajectory for each combination of force field and water model. This is significantly beyond the time scale needed to converge the conformational ensemble of the internal portions of a DNA helix absent internal base pair opening. Considering all of the simulations discussed in the current work, the MD simulations performed to assess and validate the current force fields and water models aggregate over 14 ms of simulation time. The results suggest that both the bsc1 and OL15 force fields render average structures that deviate significantly less than 1 Å from the average experimental structures. This can be compared to similar but less exhaustive simulations with the CHARMM 36 force field that aggregate to the ∼90 μs time scale and also perform well but do not produce structures as close to the DDD NMR average structures (with root-mean-square deviations of 1.3 Å) as the newer Amber force fields. On the basis of these analyses, any future research involving double-stranded DNA simulations using the Amber force fields should employ the bsc1 or OL15 modification.