GIBS: A grand-canonical Monte Carlo simulation program for simulating ion-biomolecule interactions

The ionic environment of biomolecules strongly influences their structure, conformational stability, and inter-molecular interactions. This paper introduces GIBS, a grand-canonical Monte Carlo (GCMC) simulation program for computing the thermodynamic properties of ion solutions and their distributions around biomolecules. This software implements algorithms that automate the excess chemical potential calculations for a given target salt concentration. GIBS uses a cavity-bias algorithm to achieve high sampling acceptance rates for inserting ions and solvent hard spheres in simulating dense ionic systems. In the current version, ion-ion interactions are described using Coulomb, hard-sphere, or Lennard-Jones (L-J) potentials; solvent-ion interactions are described using hard-sphere, L-J and attractive square-well potentials; and, solvent-solvent interactions are described using hard-sphere repulsions. This paper and the software package includes examples of using GIBS to compute the ion excess chemical potentials and mean activity coefficients of sodium chloride as well as to compute the cylindrical radial distribution functions of monovalent (Na, Rb), divalent (Sr), and trivalent (CoHex) around fixed all-atom models of 25 base-pair nucleic acid duplexes. GIBS is written in C++ and is freely available for community use; it can be downloaded at https://github.com/Electrostatics/GIBS.