An extended aqueous solvation model based on atom-weighted solvent accessible surface areas: SAWSA v2.0 model

A new method is proposed for calculating aqueous solvation free energy based on atom-weighted solvent accessible surface areas. The method, SAWSA v2.0, gives the aqueous solvation free energy by summing the contributions of component atoms and a correction factor. We applied two different sets of atom typing rules and fitting processes for small organic molecules and proteins, respectively. For small organic molecules, the model classified the atoms in organic molecules into 65 basic types and additionally. For small organic molecules we proposed a correction factor of hydrophobic carbon to account for the aggregation of hydrocarbons and compounds with long hydrophobic aliphatic chains. The contributions for each atom type and correction factor were derived by multivariate regression analysis of 379 neutral molecules and 39 ions with known experimental aqueous solvation free energies. Based on the new atom typing rules, the correlation coefficient (r) for fitting the whole neutral organic molecules is 0.984, and the absolute mean error is 0.40 kcal mol^–1, which is much better than those of the model proposed by Wang et al. and the SAWSA model previously proposed by us. Furthermore, the SAWSA v2.0 model was compared with the simple atom-additive model based on the number of atom types (NA). The calculated results show that for small organic molecules, the predictions from the SAWSA v2.0 model are slightly better than those from the atom-additive model based on NA. However, for macromolecules such as proteins, due to the connection between their molecular conformation and their molecular surface area, the atom-additive model based on the number of atom types has little predictive power. In order to investigate the predictive power of our model, a systematic comparison was performed on seven solvation models including SAWSA v2.0, GB/SA_1, GB/SA_2, PB/SA_1, PB/SA_2, AM1/SM5.2R and SM5.0R. The results showed that for organic molecules the SAWSA v2.0 model is better than the other six solvation models. For proteins, the model classified the atoms into 20 basic types and the predicted aqueous free energies of solvation by PB/SA were used for fitting. The solvation model based on the new parameters was employed to predict the solvation free energies of 38 proteins. The predicted values from our model were in good agreement with those from the PB/SA model and were much better than those given by the other four models developed for proteins.Figure The definition of hydrophobic carbons. Here CA, CB and CD are three carbon atoms; X represents a heteroatom. According to our definition, CB is a hydrophobic carbon, CA is not a hydrophobic carbon because a heteroatom is within four atoms and CD is not a hydrophobic carbon because CD is sp²- hydridized and in a six-member ring.Electronic Supplementary Material Supplementary material is available for this article at