Tsjerk Wassenaar wrote > > Hi John, > > Check where the unsettling water molecule is placed. If it's in the > protein. that may be the cause of the problem. Otherwise, it's some of > the other stuff you're doing, but rule out the simple things first. > >
Thank you Tsjerk. I posted a reply several days ago, and I tried again earlier today. My first attempt appeared in the email digest but not on this web page. My second attempt hasn't appeared, and I expect that my ISP is responsible (Yahoo started attaching ads to email signatures, which might set off spam filters). I'm now posting directly from Nabble. I looked at two different simulations which crashed. The unsettled water molecules appear to be far from the protein in all cases. Tentatively, then, I would conclude that my protein is fine, because the errors are not occurring in atoms which are proximal to the protein. Instead, I suspect there is something wrong with my protocol. But here are the details, so you can check my reasoning. As the details of the protocol in the last message that I posted showed, I'm using five CPU cores for my simulations. So the domain decomposition in mdrun is 5 x 1 x 1. When the simulations crash, the error handling routine outputs only the domain which contains the unsettled water molecule. In the first simulation that I examined, the domain was all solvent. No protein atoms were present. The crash occurred on step 81,240 of my final molecular dynamics run, and the atom that was identified as a problem was number 45191. So I looked at the two PDB files that were dumped, and searched for atom 45191. I think that the first file describes the system immediately before the crash, and the second file shows the results of the bad calculations, am I correct? Here is a selected portion of each file, showing atom 45191 and its neighbors: step81240b_n4.pdb ATOM 41009 OW SOL 1 74.590 46.654 65.507 ATOM 41010 HW1 SOL 1 74.580 47.272 66.294 ATOM 41011 HW2 SOL 1 73.700 46.205 65.425 ATOM 43679 OW SOL 1 71.579 49.011 70.894 ATOM 43680 HW1 SOL 1 71.730 49.197 69.924 ATOM 43681 HW2 SOL 1 71.013 49.735 71.288 ATOM 45191 OW SOL 1 72.656 46.524 71.131 ATOM 45192 HW1 SOL 1 72.614 45.938 70.322 ATOM 45193 HW2 SOL 1 72.389 47.455 70.883 ATOM 6926 OW SOL 1 75.926 46.701 73.317 ATOM 6927 HW1 SOL 1 75.024 46.674 72.886 ATOM 6928 HW2 SOL 1 76.564 47.194 72.724 ATOM 16016 OW SOL 1 73.244 51.473 72.961 ATOM 16017 HW1 SOL 1 73.712 51.310 72.092 ATOM 16018 HW2 SOL 1 73.472 52.387 73.296 step81240c_n4.pdb ATOM 41009 OW SOL 1 74.582 46.669 65.502 ATOM 41010 HW1 SOL 1 74.582 47.320 66.260 ATOM 41011 HW2 SOL 1 73.689 46.221 65.445 ATOM 43679 OW SOL 1 -66321836.00084864872.00046148104.000 ATOM 43680 HW1 SOL 1 71.706 49.216 69.937 ATOM 43681 HW2 SOL 1 1085546624.000-1490344960.000-271069120.000 ATOM 45191 OW SOL 1 -176865.797532401.250-1222093.250 ATOM 45192 HW1 SOL 1 19264928.000-53927836.000125858544.000 ATOM 45193 HW2 SOL 1 72.351 47.488 70.877 ATOM 6926 OW SOL 1 75.925 46.703 73.302 ATOM 6927 HW1 SOL 1 75.021 46.680 72.875 ATOM 6928 HW2 SOL 1 76.562 47.196 72.710 ATOM 16016 OW SOL 1 73.240 51.478 72.957 ATOM 16017 HW1 SOL 1 73.728 51.296 72.103 ATOM 16018 HW2 SOL 1 73.442 52.407 73.266 WOW. Something went seriously wrong with four atoms in that step. Are those even coordinates? For some reason, atom 45191 was selected as the one to trigger the crash report. I looked through the whole PDB file for other problems, and I found one more oxygen atom in another water molecule which had similarly wild coordinates. It was half-way across the domain, not even a neighbor of atom 45191. I had a look at atom 45191 in PyMol, and there was nothing obviously wrong with its position right before the crash. Stereo image here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/15579975@N00/7553843726/ In the second crashed simulation, only a single abnormal atom was found in the PDB file. The domain containing that water molecule did contain a part of the protein, but the water molecule was far from the protein. Here's an image of that domain (unsettled water molecule marked with an amber sphere): http://www.flickr.com/photos/15579975@N00/7554770182/ All right, so what could be wrong with my protocols? Since my problems began, I have made exactly four changes that I can see: 1) I have upgraded from GROMACS 4.0 to 4.5. 2) I once used the -deuterate option in pdb2gmx, and I am presently trying to avoid it. I asked whether -deuterate has any effect on water molecules in a previous post, or only on the hydrogens in proteins. So far, I have not been made to understand that genbox silently deuterates water hydrogens, if it receives a deuterated protein as input. 3) I have started to write automated scripts to handle my work flow. I showed the sequence of commands in an earlier post. I specify the GROMOS45a3 force field, which I thought was the default (choice 1) for pdb2gmx in GROMACS 4.0. However, I am not certain of this. GROMOS45a3 is not the default choice for GROMACS 4.5, the AMBER03 force field is. 4) I got a warning message from GROMACS 4.5 that I did not observe with 4.0. "For proper integration of the Nose-Hoover thermostat, tau_t (0.1) should be at least 20 times larger than nsttcouple*dt (0.01)." I chose to double tau_t to 0.2. This was documented in my md.mdp file. I understand that some force fields are more appropriate for certain types of simulations than others, but should any force field result in an outright crash? I have never used a step time other than 2 femtoseconds. I know that people who want to model longer time spans will use, e.g., MARTINI and larger step times, but I've never actually read a recommendation to try a SMALLER step time. Might this be necessary? I could try different force fields, I could try -deuterate again, I could reduce the step time. But every single test that I want to try amounts to approximately one day of simulation. It could take me weeks to find a problem, if I search blindly. Thanks once again for any help you can provide. -- View this message in context: http://gromacs.5086.n6.nabble.com/Re-Water-molecules-cannot-be-settled-why-tp4999302p4999553.html Sent from the GROMACS Users Forum mailing list archive at Nabble.com. -- gmx-users mailing list gmx-users@gromacs.org http://lists.gromacs.org/mailman/listinfo/gmx-users * Only plain text messages are allowed! * Please search the archive at http://www.gromacs.org/Support/Mailing_Lists/Search before posting! * Please don't post (un)subscribe requests to the list. Use the www interface or send it to gmx-users-requ...@gromacs.org. * Can't post? Read http://www.gromacs.org/Support/Mailing_Lists