That's a long bond. Does your reference length in specbond.dat suit it?
IIRC there should be some evidence in the output of the special bond
being formed if it actually is. If not, your symptoms are probably related
Hi Mark, indeed, I think that was part of the problem. pdb2gmx indeed outputs a message when a specbond.dat rule is matched and a bond formed.

In case it helps to someone else or for reference purposes, I finally managed to solve the issue.

Some of the lessons I learned:
- make sure that the residues/atoms in specbond.dat were correct (I had defined a number of residues for termini and mid-chain PEG and connectors, and I got them confused at some point, so not all of them were being recognized properly). The "dangling bond at at least one of the terminal ends" given by pdb2gmx is most likely due to this and/or the protonation state of the residues connecting the fragments - each fragment is assigned a different chain letter in the source PDB file; in my case, for a system like

[N-(peptide1)-C]-[N-(PEG)-C]-[N-(peptide2)-Lys-C]
                                            |
                                            NZ
                                            |
[C-(PEG)-N]-[C-(peptide3)-N]

each fragment in square brackets is assigned a different chain name in [A-E] in the PDB file:

ATOM 123 N ARG A 1 74.024 13.299 50.237 1.00 0.00 N1+
                     ^
- always list the atoms within a chain in an N-to-C direction. This means that the main branch is defined first, and then the branching point is defined in an N-to-C direction, even if it is counterintuitive by the way they are connected. specbond.dat takes good care of setting up the connection in all cases (as long as they are well defined...).
- the PEG residues need to be defined as type "Other" in residues.dat
- call pdb2gmx to manually assign the termini and Lys protonation states manually, and to merge the chains into a single molecule:

pdb2gmx-ter  -f  substrate.pdb-chainsep  interactive-lys

-> the "internal" termini (i.e., the ones that are peptide termini but are connected to a PEG chain) need to be given a protonation state of "None", while the "real" termini can be assigned as charged or neutral, depending on the conditions

Oh, and well done for constructing a good question. You would likely not have 
gotten anywhere giving less detail :)
Thanks, it actually helped putting everything in writing, as it pointed out the few things that I hadn't yet looked at in detail...

Pablo Englebienne, PhD
Dept. of Biomedical Engineering
Dept. of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering
Institute for Complex Molecular Systems (ICMS)
Eindhoven University of Technology, TU/e
PO Box 513, HG -1.26
5600 MB Eindhoven, The Netherlands
Tel +31 40 247 5349

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