Hi Chris, You're right, my resizing from 7.5 nm to 15 nm refers to the dimension normal to the lipid bilayer (in this case, the x dimension)
My bilayer center of mass is at around +3 nm, and I placed the CNP at around 10 nm to start with. I had periodic boundary conditions employed in all three dimensions. I didn't add the CNP using genbox or any other command- I manually manipulated the .gro coordinate file of the bilayer. When I ran an energy minimization of just the bilayer and the CNP, the nanoparticle moved, but very slightly- so far, so good. But, once I added water and did another energy minimization and checked the structure after convergence, the nanoparticle had drifted all the way up to around 0 nm, which meant it was only around 1 nm away from my bilayer before the MD run. So, yes, it drifted during the energy minimization. I should probably try what you said. I repeated the entire above process using a posre.itp file. I had created this posre.itp file using the the lipids in the bilayer, and the CNP atoms, and I used this file during the energy minimization after adding water, which is when i got the following error- "A charge group moved too far between two domain decomposition steps.". I also got a warning before the fatal EM, which said that the number of constraints I had imposed on the CNP (120) is greater than the number of possible degrees of freedom (48), which could cause the system to be unstable. I wasn't sure how to fix that, though. I'm sorry if I'm a bit vague, but I'd appreciate if you could advice me more on this issue. Thanks! Bharath Message: 7 Date: Sun, 28 Oct 2012 19:50:11 +0000 From: Christopher Neale <chris.ne...@mail.utoronto.ca> Subject: [gmx-users] Error during CNP simulation To: "gmx-users@gromacs.org" <gmx-users@gromacs.org> Message-ID: <38d83dcc07545649b56395e217ba5e8032709...@sn2prd0310mb382.namprd03.prod.outlook.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" I presume that your 7.5 nm -> 15 nm resizing refers to the Cartesian dimension that lies along the bilayer normal? Also, are you sure that the nanoparticle drifts significantly closer to the bilayer "during minimization", as you stated? That sounds unlikely. Perhaps this drift occurred during MD simulation after energy minimization? How did you implement your restraints? My first try would be using the pull code harmonic restraints to restrain the distance between the center of mass of the bilayer and the center of mass of the nanoparticle, only applying the force along the dimension of your global bilayer normal. Note that, when doing this, the distance must always remain less than 1/2 of the box length along that dimension or your simulation will be unstable. How did the system "blow up"? Was it a LINCS-based crash or massive expansion of the box or just that the bilayer fell apart? Did it blow up during energy minimization or MD simulation? Chris. -- original message -- I'm trying to simulate the diffusion of a coarse-grained carbon nanoparticle (from Monticelli) into a coarse-grained DOPC lipid bilayer, to reproduce the results obtained by Wong-Ekkabut et al. I first assembled my bilayer in a box of size 7.5 x 7.5 x 7.5 nm3, and the results appeared legitimate. However, I'm now trying to repeat the experiment by placing the carbon nanoparticle at an initial position further away from the bilayer, and so I've resized my box to 15 nm x 7.5 nm x 7.5 nm. In this case, what happens is that after solvation using genbox, if I carry out an energy minimization, the CNP drifts very close to the bilayer, rendering my increase of the box size redundant. To overcome this, I've tried restraining the positions of the CNP and the bilayer, but when I do this, my simulation 'blows up'. I'm not aware of how to overcome this problem. Would you be able to help me with this? Thanks! Regards Bharath K Srikanth -- gmx-users mailing list gmx-users@gromacs.org http://lists.gromacs.org/mailman/listinfo/gmx-users * Please search the archive at http://www.gromacs.org/Support/Mailing_Lists/Search before posting! * Please don't post (un)subscribe requests to the list. Use the www interface or send it to gmx-users-requ...@gromacs.org. * Can't post? Read http://www.gromacs.org/Support/Mailing_Lists