  We present a promising coarse-graining strategy for linking micro- and
mesoscales of soft matter systems. The approach is based on effective pairwise
interaction potentials obtained from detailed atomistic molecular dynamics (MD)
simulations, which are then used in coarse-grained dissipative particle
dynamics (DPD) simulations. Here, the effective potentials were obtained by
applying the Inverse Monte Carlo method [Lyubartsev and Laaksonen, Phys. Rev.
E. vol. 52, 3730 (1995)] on a chosen subset of degrees of freedom described in
terms of radial distribution functions. In our first application of the method,
the effective potentials were used in DPD simulations of aqueous NaCl
solutions. With the same computational effort we were able to simulate systems
of one order of magnitude larger as compared to the MD simulations. The results
from the MD and DPD simulations are found to be in excellent agreement.
