Hi Chris,

I'm not so sure as to say that all of the parameters for simulating lipid membranes were not developed with a dispersion correction. The Berger parameterisation used a dispersion correction for the pentadecane simulations which were used to parameterise the tails (although as far as I can tell from the Berger paper, this correction was not used in the DPPC membrane simulations). Furthermore, the GROMOS 53A6 parameters of Kukol were tested using simulations which applied a dispersion correction (although you could argue that these GROMOS parameters were initially developed without this correction) and if I remember correctly the CHARMM27 (but not CHARMM36) lipid parameters were intended to be used with a dispersion correction applied (although these parameters are not for use with NPT simulations).

I would still argue that above all else, you should choose parameters that someone has shown to accurately reproduce the experimental membrane properties, irrespective of whether that is the original parameterisation work or not (it may well just be your own simulation tests). The Berger force field is a good example of where this sort of testing/validation has been important. Several papers have shown that PME should be used with this force field and not the direct 1.8 nm coulombic cut-off used by Berger et al. Furthermore, in our work I mentioned before, we show that with a 1.0 nm cut-off and no dispersion correction (so the van der Waals parameters I believe were used in the Berger DPPC simulations) there are several membrane properties that do not match the experimental range. I do agree with you for the example here though, it seems (from the information provided) the dispersion correction should not be included with 1.2 nm cut-offs (and this also agrees with results from three different cut-offs tested with the Berger force field in our work).

Cheers

Tom

On 12/09/12 19:30, Christopher Neale wrote:
While dispersion correction is a great idea that helps to reduce the impact of 
the precise choice of cutoff distance on the results, the Berger parameters 
(and indeed all other parameters) were not developed with the inclusion of 
dispersion correction and one could argue that it is thus non-optimal to 
include dispersion correction here... especially since it leads to poorer 
results.

This is separate from the difference between isotropic dispersion correction and a proper 
"PME"-type LJ term. Both of which are expected to lead to smaller APLs.

When using anisotropic pressure coupling for lipid bilayers, you should use 1 
atm in all dimensions.

Chris.

-- original message --

Right I guess my biggest concern was diffusion. I did in fact do 12
simulations of DPPC bilayers for 100 ns each, and still got the
aforementioned APL and diffusion. When I turn off the dispersion, I
get more appropriate APL and MSD values, that match other papers, even
when only looking at one simulation. To me, it does not seem the mdp
file I used is able to get more common APL and diffusion values even
when averaging over a large number of simulations.

As for the pressure in the x/y direction, is it more appropriate to
use 1 atm or 0 atm for bilayer simulations?

-David


--
Dr Thomas Piggot
University of Southampton, UK.

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