I am a graduate student at the University of Michigan and I am currently trying to obtain images of my proteins with electrostatic potentials for my manuscript. For one of my proteins, there is no solved protein structure (by X-ray crystallography or NMR) and I had to use SWISS-MODEL to predict the structure. I did electrostatic potential calculation using DelPhi but when I visualized it using Chimera, the electrostatic distribution is not what I expected. I did notice the electrostatic potential calculations for other previously solved protein structures took much longer and resulted in bigger files, whereas the SWISS-MODEL-predicted protein contains much smaller .phi file size.

I was wondering if you have any idea how accurate it is to calculate the electrostatic potential based on a SWISS-MODEL predicted protein structure, and if there are ways to improve the reliability of the calculated electrostatic potentials for that protein?

Thank you very much for your help!
Sincerely,

Jingga Inlora