7,085 research outputs found
Efficient model chemistries for peptides. I. Split-valence Gaussian basis sets and the heterolevel approximation in RHF and MP2
We present an exhaustive study of more than 250 ab initio potential energy
surfaces (PESs) of the model dipeptide HCO-L-Ala-NH2. The model chemistries
(MCs) used are constructed as homo- and heterolevels involving possibly
different RHF and MP2 calculations for the geometry and the energy. The basis
sets used belong to a sample of 39 selected representants from Pople's
split-valence families, ranging from the small 3-21G to the large
6-311++G(2df,2pd). The reference PES to which the rest are compared is the
MP2/6-311++G(2df,2pd) homolevel, which, as far as we are aware, is the more
accurate PES of a dipeptide in the literature. The aim of the study presented
is twofold: On the one hand, the evaluation of the influence of polarization
and diffuse functions in the basis set, distinguishing between those placed at
1st-row atoms and those placed at hydrogens, as well as the effect of different
contraction and valence splitting schemes. On the other hand, the investigation
of the heterolevel assumption, which is defined here to be that which states
that heterolevel MCs are more efficient than homolevel MCs. The heterolevel
approximation is very commonly used in the literature, but it is seldom
checked. As far as we know, the only tests for peptides or related systems,
have been performed using a small number of conformers, and this is the first
time that this potentially very economical approximation is tested in full
PESs. In order to achieve these goals, all data sets have been compared and
analyzed in a way which captures the nearness concept in the space of MCs.Comment: 54 pages, 16 figures, LaTeX, AMSTeX, Submitted to J. Comp. Che
Computational structure‐based drug design: Predicting target flexibility
The role of molecular modeling in drug design has experienced a significant revamp in the last decade. The increase in computational resources and molecular models, along with software developments, is finally introducing a competitive advantage in early phases of drug discovery. Medium and small companies with strong focus on computational chemistry are being created, some of them having introduced important leads in drug design pipelines. An important source for this success is the extraordinary development of faster and more efficient techniques for describing flexibility in three‐dimensional structural molecular modeling. At different levels, from docking techniques to atomistic molecular dynamics, conformational sampling between receptor and drug results in improved predictions, such as screening enrichment, discovery of transient cavities, etc. In this review article we perform an extensive analysis of these modeling techniques, dividing them into high and low throughput, and emphasizing in their application to drug design studies. We finalize the review with a section describing our Monte Carlo method, PELE, recently highlighted as an outstanding advance in an international blind competition and industrial benchmarks.We acknowledge the BSC-CRG-IRB Joint Research Program in Computational Biology. This work was supported by a grant
from the Spanish Government CTQ2016-79138-R.J.I. acknowledges support from SVP-2014-068797, awarded by the Spanish Government.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft
Membrane-protein interactions in mechanosensitive channels
In this paper, we examine the mechanical role of the lipid bilayer in ion
channel conformation and function with specific reference to the case of the
mechanosensitive channel of large conductance (MscL). In a recent paper
(Wiggins and Phillips, 2004), we argued that mechanotransduction very naturally
arises from lipid-protein interactions by invoking a simple analytic model of
the MscL channel and the surrounding lipid bilayer. In this paper, we focus on
improving and expanding this analytic framework for studying lipid-protein
interactions with special attention to MscL. Our goal is to generate simple
scaling relations which can be used to provide qualitative understanding of the
role of membrane mechanics in protein function and to quantitatively interpret
experimental results. For the MscL channel, we find that the free energies
induced by lipid-protein interaction are of the same order as the free energy
differences between conductance states measured by Sukharev et al. (1999). We
therefore conclude that the mechanics of the bilayer plays an essential role in
determining the conformation and function of the channel. Finally, we compare
the predictions of our model to experimental results from the recent
investigations of the MscL channel by Perozo et al. (2002), Powl et al. (2003),
Yoshimura et al. (2004), and others and suggest a suite of new experiments
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Complex macrocycle exploration: parallel, heuristic, and constraint-based conformer generation using ForceGen.
ForceGen is a template-free, non-stochastic approach for 2D to 3D structure generation and conformational elaboration for small molecules, including both non-macrocycles and macrocycles. For conformational search of non-macrocycles, ForceGen is both faster and more accurate than the best of all tested methods on a very large, independently curated benchmark of 2859 PDB ligands. In this study, the primary results are on macrocycles, including results for 431 unique examples from four separate benchmarks. These include complex peptide and peptide-like cases that can form networks of internal hydrogen bonds. By making use of new physical movements ("flips" of near-linear sub-cycles and explicit formation of hydrogen bonds), ForceGen exhibited statistically significantly better performance for overall RMS deviation from experimental coordinates than all other approaches. The algorithmic approach offers natural parallelization across multiple computing-cores. On a modest multi-core workstation, for all but the most complex macrocycles, median wall-clock times were generally under a minute in fast search mode and under 2 min using thorough search. On the most complex cases (roughly cyclic decapeptides and larger) explicit exploration of likely hydrogen bonding networks yielded marked improvements, but with calculation times increasing to several minutes and in some cases to roughly an hour for fast search. In complex cases, utilization of NMR data to constrain conformational search produces accurate conformational ensembles representative of solution state macrocycle behavior. On macrocycles of typical complexity (up to 21 rotatable macrocyclic and exocyclic bonds), design-focused macrocycle optimization can be practically supported by computational chemistry at interactive time-scales, with conformational ensemble accuracy equaling what is seen with non-macrocyclic ligands. For more complex macrocycles, inclusion of sparse biophysical data is a helpful adjunct to computation
Predicting the effects of basepair mutations in DNA-protein complexes by thermodynamic integration
AbstractThermodynamically rigorous free energy methods in principle allow the exact computation of binding free energies in biological systems. Here, we use thermodynamic integration together with molecular dynamics simulations of a DNA-protein complex to compute relative binding free energies of a series of mutants of a protein-binding DNA operator sequence. A guanine-cytosine basepair that interacts strongly with the DNA-binding protein is mutated into adenine-thymine, cytosine-guanine, and thymine-adenine. It is shown that basepair mutations can be performed using a conservative protocol that gives error estimates of ∼10% of the change in free energy of binding. Despite the high CPU-time requirements, this work opens the exciting opportunity of being able to perform basepair scans to investigate protein-DNA binding specificity in great detail computationally
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