Toward Hydrodynamics with Solvent Free Lipid Models: STRD Martini

Solvent hydrodynamics are incorporated into simulations of the solvent-free Dry Martini model. The solvent hydrodynamics are modeled with the stochastic rotation dynamics (SRD) algorithm, a particle-based method for resolving fluid hydrodynamics. SRD does not require calculation of particle-particle distances in the solvent, and so is scalable to arbitrary volumes of solvent with minimal additional computational overhead. The viscosity of the solvent is easily tuned via parameters of the algorithm to span an order of magnitude in viscosity around the viscosity of water at room temperature. The combination "Stochastic Thermostatted Rotation Dynamics (STRD) with Martini" was implemented in Gromacs v.5.01. Simulations of an SRD/palmitoyloleoylphosphatidylcholine membrane demonstrate that the solvent may be included without reparametrizing the lipid model, with minimal perturbation to the thermodynamics. A recent generalization of Saffman-Delbruck theory to periodic geometries by Camley and Brown indicates that lipid dynamics are contaminated by a finite-size effect in typical molecular dynamics (MD) simulations, and that very large systems are required for quantitative simulation of dynamics. Analysis of lipid translational diffusion in this work shows good agreement with the theory, and with explicitly solvated simulations. This indicates that STRD Martini is a viable approach for quantitative simulation of membrane dynamics and does not require massive computational overhead to model the solvent.