Calculating the potential and charge density

The goal of the following APBS calculation is to generate visualization-quality solutions to the nonlinear PBE equation and to write out the electrostatic potential and charge density for subsequent analysis. This procedure is carried out in the following APBS input file, available for download here.

Example 1. APBS DNA condensation input file


read 
    mol pqr dna.pqr         # Read in DNA
end
elec
    mg-auto
    dime 97 97 161          # Rectangular grid dimensions
    cglen 160 160 230       # Rectangular box
    fglen 130 130 200       # Rectangular box
    cgcent mol 1            # Center on the molecule
    fgcent mol 1            # Center on the molecule
    mol 1                   
    npbe                    # Nonlinear DNA
    bcfl mdh                # Full multipole approximation
    ion 1 0.100 2.0         # 100 mM Na+
    ion -1 0.100 2.0        # 100 mM Cl-
    pdie 1.0                # Solute dielectric
    sdie 78.54              # Solvent dielectric
    chgm spl0               # Linear charge discretization
    srfm smol               # Smoothed molecular surface
    srad 1.4                # Solvent probe radius
    swin 0.3                # Spline surface window (not used)
    sdens 10.0              # Sphere density
    temp 298.15             # Temperature
    gamma 0.105             # Apolar coefficient
    calcenergy no           # No energies
    calcforce no            # No forces
    write qdens dx qdens    # Write out charge density
    write pot dx pot        # Write out potential
end

quit
        
In this example, the full multipole boundary condition was used to better represent the enlongated charge distribution of the DNA. As usual, this file can then be used with APBS via the command:

        $ apbs apbs.in
      
where apbs.in is the name of the downloaded input file. This example took roughly 4 minutes on a 2.2 GHz Intel Pentium 4.