Fast iterative method for local steric Poisson–Boltzmann theories in biomolecular solvation

Abstract

This work proposes a fast iterative method for local steric Poisson–Boltzmann (PB) theories, in which the electrostatic potential is governed by the Poisson's equation and ionic concentrations satisfy equilibrium conditions. To present the method, we focus on a local steric PB theory derived from a lattice-gas model, as an example. The advantages of the proposed method in efficiency are achieved by treating ionic concentrations as scalar implicit functions of the electrostatic potential, though such functions are only numerically achievable. The existence, uniqueness, boundness, and smoothness of such functions are rigorously established. A Newton iteration method with truncation is proposed to solve a nonlinear system discretized from the generalized PB equations. The existence and uniqueness of the solution to the discretized nonlinear system are established by showing that it is a unique minimizer of a constructed convex energy. Thanks to the boundness of ionic concentrations, truncation bounds for the potential are obtained by using the extremum principle. The truncation step in iterations is shown to be energy and error decreasing. To further speed-up computations, we propose a novel precomputing-interpolation strategy, which is applicable to other local steric PB theories and makes the proposed methods for solving steric PB theories as efficient as for solving the classical PB theory. Analysis on the Newton iteration method with truncation shows local quadratic convergence for the proposed numerical methods. Applications to realistic biomolecular solvation systems reveal that counterions with steric hindrance stratify in an order prescribed by the parameter of ionic valence-to-volume ratio. Finally, we remark that the proposed iterative methods for local steric PB theories can be readily incorporated in well-known classical PB solvers.