Jul 12, 2026, physics.chem-phJ/K move · Enter open · S save
Jan Eckwert, Julija Zavadlav
1Multiscale Modeling of Fluid Materials, Department of Engineering Physics and Computation, TUM School of Engineering and Design and Department of Physics, TUM School of Natural Sciences, Technical University of Munich, Munich, 80333, Germany. · 2Atomistic Modeling Center, Munich Data Science Institute, Technical University of Munich, Garching, 85748, Germany.
Machine learning interatomic potentials (MLPs) have revolutionized atomistic modeling, offering the potential to replace traditional methods like Density Functional Theory (DFT). However, inference time of MLPs is orders of magnitude slower than that of classical force fields, hindering real-world applications for biomolecular systems that require timescales of microseconds and beyond. Implicit solvent MLPs can address this issue, but are faced with data challenges associated with coarse-grained modeling. Consequently, previous approaches relied on empirical force field data, thereby inherently limiting the MLP's accuracy. Here, we introduce the Transferable Water Implicit Network (TWIN), an implicit water MLP parametrized entirely by an Equivariant Graph Neural Network and trained solely on ab initio and experimental labels. We demonstrate TWIN's transferability across drug-like molecules, peptides, and proteins, achieving excellent results on ab initio and experimental crystallographic and NMR benchmarks, consistently outperforming previous machine-learning-based implicit solvent or coarse-grained models. Furthermore, TWIN closely matches DFT-based explicit solvent MLPs while providing a two-order-of-magnitude faster timestep evaluation, paving the way for efficient ab initio-level modeling of biomolecular systems in aqueous environments.