Evaluation of DNA force fields in implicit solvation

DNA structural deformations and dynamics are crucial to its interactions in the cell. Theoretical simulations are essential tools used to explore the structure, dynamics, and thermodynamics of biomolecules in a systematic way. Molecular mechanics force fields for DNA have benefited from constant improvements during the past decades. Several studies have evaluated and compared available force fields when the solvent is modeled by explicit molecules. On the other hand, few systematic studies have assessed the quality of duplex DNA models when implicit solvation is employed. The interest in an implicit modeling of the solvent consists of the important gain in simulation performance and conformational sampling speed. In this study, respective influences of the force field and the implicit solvation model choice on DNA simulation quality are evaluated. To this end, extensive implicit solvent duplex DNA simulations are performed, attempting to reach both conformational and sequence diversity convergence. Structural parameters are extracted from simulations and statistically compared to available experimental and explicit solvation simulation data. Our results quantitatively expose the respective strengths and weaknesses of the different DNA force fields and implicit solvation models studied. This work can lead to the suggestion of improvements to current DNA theoretical models.