Bio Excel Webinar, 24: Perspective on the Martini Force Field

Molecular dynamics simulations is a widely used computational tool to describe the collective motions of a system of interacting particles. Traditionally, every atom in the system is represented explicitly. Although such an allatom approach provides high accuracy, it is computationally very expensive and therefore limited to small system sizes a single protein) and short time scales (nanoseconds). To alleviate this problem, coarsegrained (CG) models have gained a lot of popularity in the field of molecular simulations lately. By uniting small groups of atoms into effective interaction sites (beads), the simulation costs are strongly reduced and the temporal evolution of much larger systems can be followed over much longer time scales. In our group, we developed the Martini force field, one of the most popular CG models currently available (1). The Martini force field is a generic model that can be used to simulate a wide range of molecules, from lipids, proteins, and nucleotides to