Hi Berk,

I do not mean the box 0, and I am aware about the pull distance needing to be less than half of the smallest box length. Please allow me describe a bit more rigorously what I need to avoid. I will use an example that is totally fictitious, but is designed to emphasize the bimodal sampling issue that is relevant to my actual study.

1. Imagine that one wants to calculate the PMF for a water molecule along the normal to an asymmetric bilayer in which one leaflet is POPC and the other is lipidA.

2. The free energy for that water residing 0.1 nm away from the bilayer center in the POPC leaflet (call it -0.1 nm from the bilayer center) needs to be calculated separately from the free energy for that water residing 0.1 nm away from the bilayer center in the lipidA leaflet (call it +0.1 nm from the bilayer center).

3. Let the force constant be 500 kJ/mol/nm^2 and let the user apply pull_geometry=distance and pull_init1=0.1 while starting the replica at 0.1 nm from the bilayer center in two simulations where one takes (a) a starting water position that is 0.1 nm toward the POPC headgroups and the other takes (b) a starting position of the water to be 0.1 nm toward the lipidA headgroups.

4. I posit that the probability distributions of the water about the bilayer normal from simulations (a) and (b) in part 3 above will converge to the same distribution and that this distribution will be bimodal with one peak at -0.1 nm and one peak at +0.1 nm. This is because the simulation that started at -0.1 (0.1 nm closer to the POPC headgroups) will, even under the biasing force, infrequently cross the bilayer center of mass and then be closer to the lipidA heagroups. At this point. the direction of the applied force will the change to draw the water toward the other possible location at +0.1 nm.

5a. For displacements >> 0.1 nm, this will not be a problem.
5b. For larger force constants, this will not be a problem at 0.1 nm, but will still be a problem for some closer centers of restraint.

6. pull_geometry=distance is entirely incompatible with this approach.

7. pull_geometry=position does appear to work.


Thanks for your patience,
Chris.

-- original message --

Hi,

Sorry, but I have no clue what you mean with sampling >0
and how you would end up with a bimodal distribution.

You don't mean the box 0, do you?
That is irrelevant.
What can be a problem is that you pull distance should not be more than half the box length.

Berk

Date: Sun, 15 Nov 2009 12:33:30 -0500
From: chris.neale at utoronto.ca
To: gmx-users at gromacs.org
Subject: [gmx-users] pull code with defined negative relative displacements

> I only now noticed Justin mail on g_wham.
> You can probably also use pull_geometry=distance and pull_init=1,
> if you starting structure has group1 close to 1 nm below group 0.

Agreed, although this will not work when the force constant is not strong enough to inhibit any sampling >0 -- wherein the distribution about 0 would become bimodal and this is something that I can not allow.

As far as I can tell, pull_geometry=position, pull_init1<0, and pull_vec1=0 0 0 is the solution, as per my previous message.

Thank you,
Chris.


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