Quoting [email protected]:

Hi again,

first of all, thanks for the reply.


Message: 6
Date: Mon, 30 Jan 2012 23:12:46 +1100
From: Mark Abraham <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: [gmx-users] How to calculate hydration of lipid
        headgroups by   minimum distance means
To: Discussion list for GROMACS users <[email protected]>
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-7; format=flowed

On 30/01/2012 10:44 PM, Ioannis Beis wrote:
Dear Gromacs users,

I am trying to calculate the hydration of lipid headgroups in a lipid
bilayer system. More specifically, I would like to find the
time-averaged distribution of water molecules around lipid headgroups
by means of the closest distance of the water oxygen from any atom of
any lipid headgroup and plot this distribution as a function of
distance. I would subsequently like to integrate the number of
molecules until a distance that I will choose based on the results of
the first calculation.

You can have either the distribution over time of the minimum distance
between any water oxygen and any lipid headgroup atom from g_mindist, or
the distribution over space of water oxygen atoms around lipid headgroup
atoms (a.k.a. radial distribution function) from g_rdf. The above does
not make clear to me that you are clear about which one you want.


g_mindist seems to provide the possibility of doing the latter with -d
and also allows counting each molecule in the integration only once
with -group. However, what it can do in the first place is essentially
different. It calculates the minimum distance among any pair of groups
of atoms for all times. With -or it calculates the closest distance
among all frames for every residue. So for my system those would give
the smallest distance of any water to any headgroup vs time and the
closest distance of every water with any headgroup among all frames
respectively. This in practice produces something more than twice the
van der Waals radius of an atom with small fluctuations.

Yep. That's what g_mindist does. I think you want g_rdf.

I experimentised with g_rdf. I provide an index with first group all the headgroup atoms and second group all the water oxygen atoms and issue the command with either -surf mol or -surf res. The two hydration peaks appear tiny and the function grows all the way till around 3 nm (which depends on my box size). This is almost the same as when I use all the atoms of a single headgroup as a first group. Also, the manual mentions that -surf doesn't give normalized results, but I guess this means that it does not divide the time-averaged number of waters at each slice with the number of waters before each of those slices and multiply with the volume ratio of each slice over its inner sphere. If waters in this process would be counted only once each, this does not justify an average of about 1000 waters per bin in more than 1500 bins (I just used the default bins) in a system that contains 6070 water molecules.

So how is the minimum distance between two groups interpreted by the program with -surf? I would like for each water oxygen the distance between itself and the closest atom of any headgroup and each water counted only once. Then I would like to have the time-averaged distribution defined like this, which should give rise to the hydration shells, followed by a plateau with lower values than the peaks and then drop to zero. Could you explain me what g_rdf calculated in my case and how I could obtain what I am looking for?


Thank you very much in advance!

Ioannis


Mark


g_dist doesn't even calculate minimum distances and g_bond isn't
relevant.

Is there a way to produce the data I need to use as input for
g_analyze so that I can eventually get the distribution with a
combination of conventional Gromacs tools? I would appreciate any
instructive comment related to my problem.

Thank you very much in advance!

Ioannis




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