Fast estimation of solvation free energies for diverse chemical species

The free energy of solvation can play an important or even dominant role in the accurate prediction of binding affinities and various other molecular-scale interaction phenomena critical to the study of biochemical processes. Many research applications for solvation modeling, such as fragment-based drug design, require algorithms that are both accurate and computationally inexpensive. We have developed a calculation of solvation free energy which runs fast enough for interactive applications, functions for a wide range of chemical species relevant to simulating molecules for biological and pharmaceutical applications, and is readily extended when data for new species becomes available. We have also demonstrated that the incorporation of ab initio data provides necessary access to sufficient reference data for a broad range of chemical features. Our empirical model, including an electrostatic term and a different set of atom types, demonstrates improvements over a previous, solvent-accessible surface area-only model by Wang et al. when fit to identical training sets (mean absolute error of 0.513 kcal/mol versus the 0.538 kcal/mol reported by Wang). The incorporation of ab initio solvation free energies provides a significant increase in the breadth of chemical features for which the model can be applied by introducing classes of compounds for which little or no experimental data is available. The increased breadth and the speed of this solvation model allow for conformational minimization, conformational search, and ligand binding free energy calculations that economically account for the complex interplay of bonded, nonbonded, and solvation free energies as conformations with varying solvent-accessible surfaces are sampled.