[Chimera-users] SASA vs. MSA

[Elaine Meng]

Hi Nikolay,
I suspect you may be using a cutoff value for this comparison, which may be giving a false impression.

I believe the sets of atoms contributing to MS (SES) and SAS should be the same, based on the definitions of these surfaces (see Fig 3 in http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/ieee_pilot/articles/06/ttg2009061391/figures.html ).

I.e., these commands should select the same or very nearly the same numbers of atoms:

sel @/areaSAS>0
sel @/areaSES>0

However, if you are looking at contributions to SES and SAS >N square angstroms where N>0, because the SAS is farther out from the atomic centers and thus larger in magnitude, that will select more atoms for SAS.

VDW radius is irrelevant to this comparison since the SES and SAS calculations are based on the same set of atomic radii.

I hope this clarifies things,
Elaine

On Aug 4, 2012, at 9:09 PM, Nikolay Igorovich Rodionov wrote:

> Hi all,
>  
> I was wondering if you could help me conceptualize what is going on in this situation. I ran both solvent accessible surface area and solvent excluded (molecular) surface area calculations. When I compared the output for both of these calculations I found that, overall, atoms that contribute to the SASA are buried 1-3 angstroms deeper in the protein than those that contribute to the MSA.
> 
> I don’t really understand how this could be unless the deeper buried SASA atoms have a much larger van der waals radii than MSA atoms (I get that some atoms contribute to both).
>  
> Thanks!
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