Solvent diffusion outside macromolecular surfaces

The effect of the inhomogeneous environment upon solvent molecules close to a macromolecular surface is evaluated from a molecular-dynamics simulation of a protein, myoglobin, in water solution. The simulation is analyzed in terms of a mean-field potential from the protein upon the water molecules and spatially varying translational diffusion coefficients for solvent molecules in directions parallel and perpendicular to the protein surface. The diffusion coefficients can be obtained from the slope of the average-square displacements vs time, as well as from the integral of the velocity autocorrelation functions. It is shown that the former procedure gives a lot of ambiguities due to the variation of the slope of the curve with time. The latter, however, after analytic correction for the contribution from algebraic long-time tails, furnish a much more reliable alternative.