Evaluation on performance of MM/PBSA in nucleic acid-protein systems

The molecular mechanics/Poisson-Boltzmann surface area (MM/PBSA) method has been widely used in predicting the binding affinity among ligands, proteins, and nucleic acids. However, the accuracy of the predicted binding energy by the standard MM/PBSA is not always good, especially in highly charged systems. In this work, we take the protein-nucleic acid complexes as an example, and showed that the use of screening electrostatic energy (instead of Coulomb electrostatic energy) in molecular mechanics can greatly improve the performance of MM/PBSA. In particular, the Pearson correlation coefficient of dataset II in the modified MM/PBSA (i.e., screening MM/PBSA) is about 0.52, much better than that (< 0.33) in the standard MM/PBSA. Further, we also evaluate the effect of solute dielectric constant and salt concentration on the performance of the screening MM/PBSA. The present study highlights the potential power of the screening MM/PBSA for predicting the binding energy in highly charged bio-systems.