In the coarse grained Brownian Dynamics simulation method the many solvent molecules are replaced by random thermal kicks and an effective friction acting on the particles of interest. For Brownian Dynamics the friction has to be so strong that the particles' velocities are damped much faster than the duration of an integration timestep. Here we show that this conceptual limit can be dropped with an analytic integration of the equations of damped motion. In the resulting Langevin integration scheme our recently proposed approximate form of the hydrodynamic interactions between the particles can be incorparated conveniently, leading to a fast multi-particle propagation scheme, which captures more of the short-time and short-range solvent effects than standard BD. Comparing the dynamics of a bead-spring model of a short peptide, we recommend to run simulations of small biological molecules with the Langevin type finite damping and to include the hydrodynamic interactions.
We employ a recently developed coarse-grained model for peptides and proteins where the effect of pH is automatically included. We explore the effect of pH in the aggregation process of the amyloidogenic peptide KTVIIE and two related sequences, using three different pH environments. Simulations using large systems (24 peptides chains per box) allow us to correctly account for the formation of realistic peptide aggregates. We evaluate the thermodynamic and kinetic implications of changes in sequence and pH upon peptide aggregation, and we discuss how a minimalistic coarse-grained model can acc…
University of Chicago（芝加哥大学）；Los Alamos National Laboratory（洛斯阿拉莫斯国家实验室）；Johns Hopkins University（约翰斯·霍普金斯大学）
Electronically-active organic molecules have demonstrated great promise as novel soft materials for energy harvesting and transport. Self-assembled nanoaggregates formed from $π$-conjugated oligopeptides composed of an aromatic core flanked by oligopeptide wings offer emergent optoelectronic properties within a water soluble and biocompatible substrate. Nanoaggregate properties can be controlled by tuning core chemistry and peptide composition, but the sequence-structure-function relations remain poorly characterized. In this work, we employ coarse-grained molecular dynamics simulations within…
We construct a one-bead-per-residue coarse-grained dynamical model to describe intrinsically disordered proteins at significantly longer timescales than in the all-atom models. In this model, inter-residue contacts form and disappear during the course of the time evolution. The contacts may arise between the sidechains, the backbones or the sidechains and backbones of the interacting residues. The model yields results that are consistent with many all-atom and experimental data on these systems. We demonstrate that the geometrical properties of various homopeptides differ substantially in this…
Force-Guided Bridge Matching for Full-Atom Time-Coarsened Dynamics of Peptides
Tsinghua University（清华大学）；Institute for AI Industry Research (AIR), Tsinghua University（清华大学人工智能产业研究院（AIR））；Gaoling School of Artificial Intelligence, Renmin University of China（中国人民大学高瓴人工智能学院）
The anchor of most integral membrane proteins consists of one or several helices spanning the lipid bilayer. The WALP peptide, GWW(LA)$_n$(L)WWA, is a common model helix to study the fundamentals of protein insertion and folding, as well as helix-helix association in the membrane. Its structural properties have been illuminated in a large number of experimental and simulation studies. In this combined coarse-grained and atomistic simulation study, we probe the thermodynamics of a single WALP peptide, focusing on both the insertion across the water-membrane interface, as well as folding in both…
Protein oligomers have been implicated as toxic agents in a wide range of amyloid-related diseases. Yet it has remained unsolved whether the oligomers are a necessary step in the formation of amyloid fibrils, or just a dangerous by-product. Analogously, it has not been resolved if the amyloid nucleation process is a classical one-step nucleation process, or a two-step process involving pre-nucleation clusters. We use coarse-grained computer simulations to study the effect of non-specific attractions between peptides on the primary nucleation process underlying amyloid fibrillization. We find t…
Certain sequences of peptoid polymers (synthetic analogs of peptides) assemble into bilayer nanosheets via a nonequilibrium assembly pathway of adsorption, compression, and collapse at an air-water interface. As with other large-scale dynamic processes in biology and materials science, understanding the details of this supramolecular assembly process requires a modeling approach that captures behavior on a wide range of length and time scales, from those on which individual sidechains fluctuate to those on which assemblies of polymers evolve. Here we demonstrate that a new coarse-grained model…
Calcein leakage assays are a standard experimental set-up for probing the extent of damage induced by external agents on synthetic lipid vesicles. The fluorescence signal associated with calcein release from liposomes is the signature of vesicle disruption, transient pore formation or vesicle fusion. This type of assay is widely used to test the membrane disruptive effect of biological macromolecules, such as proteins, antimicrobial peptides and RNA and is also used on synthetic nanoparticles with a polymer, metal or oxide core. Little is known about the effect that calcein and other fluoresce…
Despite the significant increase in computational power, molecular modeling of protein structure using classical all-atom approaches remains inefficient, at least for most of the protein targets in the focus of biomedical research. Perhaps the most successful strategy to overcome the inefficiency problem is multiscale modeling to merge all-atom and coarse-grained models. This chapter describes a well-established CABS coarse-grained protein model. The CABS (C-Alpha, C-Beta and Side chains) model assumes a 2-4 united-atom representation of amino acids, knowledge-based force field (derived from t…
We inquire to what extent protein peptide plane and side chain dynamics can be reconstructed from knowledge of C-alpha dynamics. Due to lack of experimental data we analyze all atom molecular dynamics trajectories from Anton supercomputer, and for clarity we limit our attention to the peptide plane O atoms and side chain C-beta atoms. We try and reconstruct their dynamics using four different approaches. Three of these are the publicly available reconstruction programs Pulchra, Remo Scwrl4. The fourth, Statistical Method, builds entirely on statistical analysis of Protein Data Bank (PDB) struc…
UniSim: A Unified Simulator for Time-Coarsened Dynamics of Biomolecules
Department of Computer Science and Technology, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China（清华大学计算机科学与技术系）；Institute for AI Industry Research (AIR), Tsinghua University, Beijing, China（清华大学人工智能产业研究院）；Gaoling School of Artificial intelligence, Renmin University of China, Beijing, China（中国人民大学agog学校人工智能学院）；Engineering Research Center of Next-Generation Intelligent Search and Recommendation, MOE（下一代智能搜索与推荐工程研究中心，教育部）
Accurate modeling of the solvent environment for biological molecules is crucial for computational biology and drug design. A popular approach to achieve long simulation time scales for large system sizes is to incorporate the effect of the solvent in a mean-field fashion with implicit solvent models. However, a challenge with existing implicit solvent models is that they often lack accuracy or certain physical properties compared to explicit solvent models, as the many-body effects of the neglected solvent molecules is difficult to model as a mean field. Here, we leverage machine learning (ML…
