Two-phase flow analogy as an effective boundary condition for modelling liquids at atomistic resolution, Journal of Computational Science http://dx.doi.org/10. 1016/j.jocs.2016.03.012 This is a PDF file of an unedited manuscript that has been accepted for publication. As a service to our customers we are providing this early version of the manuscript. The manuscript will undergo copyediting, typesetting, and review of the resulting proof before it is published in its final form. Please note that during the production process errors may be discovered which could affect the content, and all legal disclaimers that apply to the journal pertain.
HighlightsWe have recently suggested and implemented a new approach to the problem of computing liquids at multiple scales in space and time based on the two-phase hydrodynamics analogy. Instead of separating the system into parts using boundaries, in the current hybrid approach the liquid is described as a nominally two-phase system consisting of both particle and continuum at the same time and using the continuum part of the model as an effective opendomain boundary condition for atomistic simulations. For the current paper, the method has been extended to dynamically tracking the atomistic-resolution features of interest which can evolve in the flow. Simulations of two very different biomolecular systems have been performed using our hybrid method implemented in the framework of the popular open-source GROMACS software. For both examples, it has been shown that the hybrid model can preserve important properties of the molecular part of the system. For the problem of peptide diffusion in water, the method has allowed obtaining the value of diffusion coefficient which is very close to that one of the reference all-atom simulation. For the virus in water problem, the method has preserved the structure of the virus capsid despite a relatively thin layer of molecular water around the proteins constituting the capsid, and which is in contrast with the all-atom simulation with the standard periodic boundary conditions. 3 Abstract A hybrid Molecular Dynamics/ Fluctuating Hydrodynamics framework based on the analogy with two-phase hydrodynamics has been extended to dynamically tracking the feature of interest at all-atom resolution. In the model, the hydrodynamics description is used as an effective boundary condition to close the molecular dynamics solution without resorting to standard periodic boundary conditions. The approach is implemented in a popular Molecular Dynamics package GROMACS and results for two biomolecular systems are reported. A small peptide dialanine and a complete capsid of a virus porcine circovirus 2 in water are considered and shown to reproduce the structural and dynamic properties compared to those obtained in theory, purely atomistic simulations, and experiment.