Hybrid MD-Go considerations

Typically, Go simulations are conducted in the absence of solvent and with electrostatic and van der Waals forces in the system turned off to improve conformational space exploration. Due to the current implementation of Go, the partial charges and van der Waals radii need to be set to zero in the psf and parameter file to remove the physical nonbonded interactions. Additionally, NAMD uses a reference PDB structure to construct the Go pairwise potential between atoms.

Finally, the Go model in NAMD introduces the idea of chain types. Consider modeling a protein-nucleic acid complex. Using classical all-atom MD, a single force field describes all possible nonbonded interactions. With Go, however, one can create separate nonbonded force fields to describe the protein and nucleic acid interactions. In order to create separate force fields, atoms are grouped together using chain types where the chain types are taken from the occupancy field of the reference PDB file. For argument sake, assume that the protein atoms have an occupancy value of 1.0 and that the nucleic acid atoms have an occupancy value of 2.0. One now must define three separate Go potentials for intra-protein, intra-nucleic acid, and inter-protein-nucleic acid interactions. In terms of chain types, this corresponds to (1) between atom pairs fully in chain 1, (2) between atom pairs fully in chain 2, (3) between atom pairs where one atom is in chain 1 and the other atom is in chain 2 respectively. To run Go, a minimum of one chain type must be defined.