Developments in the US-SOMO bead modeling suite: new features in the direct residue-to-bead method, improved grid routines, and influence of accessible surface area screening.

The US-SOMO suite provides a flexible interface for accurately computing solution parameters from 3D structures of biomacromolecules through bead-modeling approaches. We present an extended analysis of the influence of accessible surface area screening, overlap reduction routines, and approximations for non-coded residues and missing atoms on the computed parameters for models built by the residue-to-bead direct correspondence and the cubic grid methods. Importantly, by taking the theoretical hydration into account at the atomic level, the performance of the grid-type models becomes comparable or exceeds that of the corresponding hydrated residue-to-bead models.