Sampling of Organic Solutes in Aqueous and Heterogeneous Environments Using Oscillating Excess Chemical Potentials in Grand Canonical-like Monte Carlo-Molecular Dynamics Simulations

ABSTRACT: Solute sampling of explicit bulk-phase aqueous environments in grand canonical (GC) ensemble simulations suffer from poor convergence due to low insertion probabilities of the solutes. To address this, we developed an iterative procedure involving Grand Canonical-like Monte Carlo (GCMC) and molecular dynamics (MD) simulations. Each iteration involves GCMC of both the solutes and water followed by MD, with the excess chemical potential (μex) of both the solute and the water oscillated to attain their target concentrations in the simulation system. By periodically varying the μex of the water and solutes over the GCMC-MD iterations, solute exchange probabilities and the spatial distributions of the solutes improved. The utility of the oscillating-μex GCMC-MD method is indicated by its ability to approximate the hydration free energy (HFE) of the individual solutes in aqueous solution as well as in dilute aqueous mixtures of multiple solutes. For seven organic solutes: benzene, propane, acetaldehyde, methanol, formamide, acetate, an