34 research outputs found
Computer Simulations Provide Guidance for Molecular Medicine through Insights on Dynamics and Mechanisms at the Atomic Scale
International audienceComputer simulations provide crucial insights and rationales for the design of molecular approaches in medicine. Several case studies illustrate how molecular model building and molecular dynamics simulations of complex molecular assemblies such as membrane proteins help in that process. Important aspects relate to build relevant molecular models with and without a crystal structure, to model membrane aggregates, then to link (dynamic) models to function, and finally to understand key disease-triggering phenomena such as aggregation. Through selected examples-including key signaling pathways in neurotransmission-the links between a molecular-level understanding of biological mechanisms and original approaches to treat disease conditions will be illuminated. Such treatments may be symptomatic, e.g. by better understanding the function and pharmacology of macromolecular key players, or curative, e.g. through molecular inhibition of disease-inducing molecular processes
Improving Internal Peptide Dynamics in the Coarse-Grained MARTINI Model: Toward Large-Scale Simulations of Amyloid- and Elastin-like Peptides
We present an extension of the coarse-grained MARTINI
model for
proteins and apply this extension to amyloid- and elastin-like peptides.
Atomistic simulations of tetrapeptides, octapeptides, and longer peptides
in solution are used as a reference to parametrize a set of pseudodihedral
potentials that describe the internal flexibility of MARTINI peptides.
We assess the performance of the resulting model in reproducing various
structural properties computed from atomistic trajectories of peptides
in water. The addition of new dihedral angle potentials improves agreement
with the contact maps computed from atomistic simulations significantly.
We also address the question of which parameters derived from atomistic
trajectories are transferable between different lengths of peptides.
The modified coarse-grained model shows reasonable transferability
of parameters for the amyloid- and elastin-like peptides. In addition,
the improved coarse-grained model is also applied to investigate the
self-assembly of ÎČ-sheet forming peptides on the microsecond
time scale. The octapeptides SNNFGAIL and (GV)4 are used
to examine peptide aggregation in different environments, in water,
and at the waterâoctane interface. At the interface, peptide
adsorption occurs rapidly, and peptides spontaneously aggregate in
favor of stretched conformers resembling ÎČ-strands
The inverted free energy landscape of an intrinsically disordered peptide by simulations and experiments
The free energy landscape theory has been very successful in rationalizing the folding behaviour of globular proteins, as this representation provides intuitive information on the number of states involved in the folding process, their populations and pathways of interconversion. We extend here this formalism to the case of the A\u3b240 peptide, a 40-residue intrinsically disordered protein fragment associated with Alzheimer's disease. By using an advanced sampling technique that enables free energy calculations to reach convergence also in the case of highly disordered states of proteins, we provide a precise structural characterization of the free energy landscape of this peptide. We find that such landscape has inverted features with respect to those typical of folded proteins. While the global free energy minimum consists of highly disordered structures, higher free energy regions correspond to a large variety of transiently structured conformations with secondary structure elements arranged in several different manners, and are not separated from each other by sizeable free energy barriers. From this peculiar structure of the free energy landscape we predict that this peptide should become more structured and not only more compact, with increasing temperatures, and we show that this is the case through a series of biophysical measurements
Combined Experimental and Simulation Studies Suggest a Revised Mode of Action of the Anti-Alzheimer Disease Drug NQ-Trp
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