Influence of Iodine Merz-Singh-Kollman Radius on the Calculated Charges and Hydration Free Energies of Iodinated Molecules

Empirical force field methods typically rely on point charges to describe the electrostatic interactions, which is problematic when anisotropy needs to be considered, as in the case of the electrostatic potential of covalently bound halogens that possess a positive site, termed sigma-hole, surrounded by a large negative belt. To address this, an off-center point charge (extra point, EP) is usually placed at a given distance from the halogen to emulate the sigma-hole and commonly used implementations are based on the restrained electrostatic potential (RESP) procedure to fit atomic charges, being one of the most used charge models. In this context, no specific Merz-Singh-Kollman (MK) radius for iodine is available in the literature, which is an essential parameter in the RESP fitting procedure. In this work, we explored the impact of the iodine MK radius on the obtained RESP charges for a set of 12 iodinated molecules. We ver-ified that the relative root mean square (RRMS) values obtained with and without an EP kept decreasing with increasing radii for most compounds, thus impairing optimization using such a procedure. Nevertheless, the use of an iodine MK radius lower than 2 & Aring; is not advisable since the RRMS kept decreasing considerably until this value was reached. Moreover, the performance of three iodine MK radii was studied with the estimation of the free energy of hydration (Delta G(hyd)) values using alchemical free energy calculations, which are particularly sensitive to the charges used. Despite the usage of different radii not leading to remarkable differences, our results indicate that using a value of 2.70 & Aring; leads to lower mean absolute errors (MAE) and root mean squared error (RMSE) values when comparing the calculated with the experimental Delta G(hyd) values.