Step 2 involves taking these frozen densities and adjusting their parameters to match the EDA frozen electrostatic density energy. While the initial RESP fit provided reasonable site density populations and exponents, their ability to produce accurate electrostatic energies between nucleobases proved to be subpar, albeit better than a point charge only model. To address this, we minimized the L 2 Lagrangian with respect to two scaling parameters, λ q and λ α , that uniformly scaled the frozen populations and exponents, respectively.