An accurate and efficient computation method of the hydration free energy of a large, complex molecule

The hydration free energy (HFE) is a crucially important physical quantity to discuss various chemical processes in aqueous solutions. Although an explicit-solvent computation with molecular dynamics (MD) simulations is a preferable treatment of the HFE, huge computational load has been inevitable for large, complex solutes like proteins. In the present paper, we propose an efficient computation method for the HFE. In our method, the HFE is computed as a sum of 〈U_UV〉/2 (〈U_UV〉 is the ensemble average of the sum of pair interaction energy between solute and water molecule) and the water reorganization term mainly reflecting the excluded volume effect. Since 〈U_UV〉 can readily be computed through a MD of the system composed of solute and water, an efficient computation of the latter term leads to a reduction of computational load. We demonstrate that the water reorganization term can quantitatively be calculated using the morphometric approach (MA) which expresses the term as the linear combinations of the four geometric measures of a solute and the corresponding coefficients determined with the energy representation (ER) method. Since the MA enables us to finish the computation of the solvent reorganization term in less than 0.1 s once the coefficients are determined, the use of the MA enables us to provide an efficient computation of the HFE even for large, complex solutes. Through the applications, we find that our method has almost the same quantitative performance as the ER method with substantial reduction of the computational load.