Introduction

APBS is a software package for the numerical solution of the Poisson-Boltzmann equation (PBE), one of the most popular continuum models for describing electrostatic interactions between molecular solutes in salty, aqueous media. Continuum electrostatics plays an important role in several areas of biomolecular simulation, including:

APBS was designed to efficiently evaluate electrostatic properties for such simulations for a wide range of length scales to enable the investigation of molecules with tens to millions of atoms.

Financial support. The development of APBS has been supported financially by:

Citing APBS. Please acknowledge your use of APBS by citing:

Baker NA, Sept D, Joseph S, Holst MJ, McCammon JA. Electrostatics of nanosystems: application to microtubules and the ribosome. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 98, 10037-10041, 2001.

Contributing authors. APBS was primarily written by Nathan Baker during his graduate work with J. Andrew McCammon and Michael Holst and extensively developed over the subsequent years. APBS uses several libraries written by Mike Holst and members of the Holst group, including: PMG (multigrid solver for Cartesian mesh discretization), FEtk (provides finite element framework, error estimators, and solvers), and MALOC (hardware abstraction library for code portability). Additionally, a number of people have made important contributions to enhance APBS functionality and usability. The full author list (in alphabetical order) is: