{"doi":"10.1101/2025.05.31.657166","title":"A simple method for introducing a cutoff to hydrodynamic interactions in Brownian dynamics simulations","abstract":"Brownian dynamics (BD) simulations that include hydrodynamic interactions (HIs) modeled at the Rotne-Prager-Yamakawa (RPY) level of theory are a valuable tool for accurately modeling the translational and rotational diffusion of macromolecules such as proteins and nucleic acids. A major drawback to the inclusion of HIs in BD simulations is their computational expense, and an obvious way to consider reducing the expense of BD-HI simulations is to include a cutoff such that HIs beyond a certain distance are omitted. Unfortunately, a naïve attempt to implement such a scheme usually leads to the RPY diffusion tensor becoming non-positive definite, which has the consequence that it becomes impossible to compute the correlated random displacements required by the Ermak-McCammon BD-HI algorithm. Here I show that a simple approach can be used to overcome this problem and implement a distance-based cutoff scheme that is guaranteed to lead to a diffusion tensor that is positive definite. The method involves only a straightforward distance-based scaling of the original RPY terms, and allows a seamless transition to be made between BD simulations that neglect HIs entirely and simulations that include HIs at the full RPY level of theory.","journal":"bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory)","year":2025,"id":567521,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":0,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.9509,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2025-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":612908,"name":"Adrian H. Elcock","orcid":"0000-0003-2820-1376","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":18,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-19T02:56:44.340853Z","pmid":"40502123","pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}