Links to specific documentation :

Introduction

SDA7 can be used to carry out Brownian dynamics simulations of the diffusional association in a continuum aqueous solvent of two solute molecules, e.g. proteins, or of a solute molecule to an inorganic surface. SDA7 can also be used to simulate the diffusion of multiple proteins, in dilute or concentrated solutions, e.g., to study the effects of macromolecular crowding.

If the 3D structure of the bound complex is unknown, SDA can be used for rigid-body docking to predict the structure of the diffusional encounter complex or the orientation in which a protein binds to a surface. The configurations obtained from SDA can subsequently be refined by running molecular dynamics simulations to obtain structures for fully bound complexes.

If the 3D structure of the bound complex is known, SDA can be used to calculate bimolecular association rate constants. It can also be used to record Brownian dynamics trajectories or encounter complexes and to calculate bimolecular electron transfer rate constants.

While these Brownian dynamics simulations are usually carried out with rigid solutes, in SDA7 we give a possibility to assign more than one conformation to each solute molecule. This allows some large-scale internal dynamics of macromolecules to be considered in the simulations.

In this SDA distribution, there is a single executable, sda_flex, which will execute different types of simulation:

The simulations can be run in serial or in parallel mode on a shared-memory computer architecture.

In addition, there are various auxiliary programs for the preparation of input data and for the analysis of the output results (see the description of the tools).

You may want to start by reading the tutorial or browsing through the examples.

Software requirements for running SDA
  1. ECM - Effective Charges for Macromolecules in solvent - a program to calculate effective charges used for computing electrostatic interaction forces and energies. It is included in this SDA distribution.
  2. APBS - Adaptive Poisson-Boltzmann Solver used by SDA to calculate electrostatic potentials.  (APBS calculated electrostatic potentials should be converted to binary UHBD format.)
    or
    UHBD - University of Houston Brownian Dynamics program used by SDA to calculate electrostatic potentials.
For some applications of SDA, the following programs are needed:
  1. HARLEM - to calculate the electronic coupling between donor (or acceptor) atoms and accessible atoms of a protein (for electron transfer rate calculations only).
  2. NACCESS - solvent accessible surface area calculation program.By default, the SDA distribution provides a different implementation for solvent accessible surface area calculations but the user can choose to use NACCESS instead.