Enhancing sampling of water rehydration upon ligand binding using variants of grand canonical Monte Carlo

Methods for Theoretical Treatment of Local Fields in Proteins and Enzymes

Electric fields generated by protein scaffolds are crucial in enzymatic catalysis. This review surveys theoretical approaches for detecting, analyzing, and comparing electric fields, electrostatic potentials, and their effects on the charge density within enzyme active sites. Pioneering methods like the empirical valence bond approach rely on evaluating ionic and covalent resonance forms influenced by the field. Strategies employing polarizable force fields also facilitate field detection. The vibrational Stark effect connects computational simulations to experimental Stark spectroscopy, enabling direct comparisons. We highlight how protein dynamics induce fluctuations in local fields, influencing enzyme activity. Recent techniques assess electric fields throughout the active site volume rather than only at specific bonds, and machine learning helps relate these global fields to reactivity. Quantum theory of atoms in molecules captures the entire electron density landscape, providing a chemically intuitive perspective on field-driven catalysis. Overall, these methodologies show protein-generated fields are highly dynamic and heterogeneous, and understanding both aspects is critical for elucidating enzyme mechanisms. This holistic view empowers rational enzyme engineering by tuning electric fields, promising new avenues in drug design, biocatalysis, and industrial applications. Future directions include incorporating electric fields as explicit design targets to enhance catalytic performance and biochemical functionalities.

Enhanced Sampling of Buried Charges in Free Energy Calculations Using Replica Exchange with Charge Tempering

Buried ionizable groups in proteins often play important structural and functional roles. However, it is generally challenging to study the detailed molecular mechanisms solely based on experimental measurements. Free energy calculations using atomistic simulations, on the other hand, complement experimental studies and can provide high temporal and spatial resolution information that can lead to mechanistic insights. Nevertheless, it is also well recognized that sufficient sampling of such atomistic simulations can be challenging, considering that structural changes related to the buried charges may be very slow. In the present study, we describe a simple but effective enhanced sampling technique called replica exchange with charge tempering (REChgT) with a novel free energy method, multisite λ dynamics (MSλD), to study two systems containing buried charges, pKa prediction of a small molecule, orotate, in complex with the dihydroorotate dehydrogenase, and relative stability of a Glu-Lys pair buried in the hydrophobic core of two variants of Staphylococcal nuclease. Compared to the original MSλD simulations, the usage of REChgT dramatically increases sampling in both conformational and alchemical spaces, which directly translates into a significant reduction of wall time to converge the free energy calculations. This study highlights the importance of sufficient sampling toward developing improved free energy methods.

GPU-specific algorithms for improved solute sampling in grand canonical Monte Carlo simulations

The Grand Canonical Monte Carlo (GCMC) ensemble defined by the excess chemical potential, μex , volume, and temperature, in the context of molecular simulations allows for variations in the number of particles in the system. In practice, GCMC simulations have been widely applied for the sampling of rare gasses and water, but limited in the context of larger molecules. To overcome this limitation, the oscillating μex GCMC method was introduced and shown to be of utility for sampling small solutes, such as formamide, propane, and benzene, as well as for ionic species such as monocations, acetate, and methylammonium. However, the acceptance of GCMC insertions is low, and the method is computationally demanding. In the present study, we improved the sampling efficiency of the GCMC method using known cavity-bias and configurational-bias algorithms in the context of GPU architecture. Specifically, for GCMC simulations of aqueous solution systems, the configurational-bias algorithm was extended by applying system partitioning in conjunction with a random interval extraction algorithm, thereby improving the efficiency in a highly parallel computing environment. The method is parallelized on the GPU using CUDA and OpenCL, allowing for the code to run on both Nvidia and AMD GPUs, respectively. Notably, the method is particularly well suited for GPU computing as the large number of threads allows for simultaneous sampling of a large number of configurations during insertion attempts without additional computational overhead. In addition, the partitioning scheme allows for simultaneous insertion attempts for large systems, offering considerable efficiency. Calculations on the BK Channel, a transporter, including a lipid bilayer with over 760,000 atoms, show a speed up of ~53-fold through the use of system partitioning. The improved algorithm is then combined with an enhanced μex oscillation protocol and shown to be of utility in the context of the site-identification by ligand competitive saturation (SILCS) co-solvent sampling approach as illustrated through application to the protein CDK2.

WaterKit: Thermodynamic Profiling of Protein Hydration Sites

Water desolvation is one of the key components of the free energy of binding of small molecules to their receptors. Thus, understanding the energetic balance of solvation and desolvation resulting from individual water molecules can be crucial when estimating ligand binding, especially when evaluating different molecules and poses as done in High-Throughput Virtual Screening (HTVS). Over the most recent decades, several methods were developed to tackle this problem, ranging from fast approximate methods (usually empirical functions using either discrete atom-atom pairwise interactions or continuum solvent models) to more computationally expensive and accurate ones, mostly based on Molecular Dynamics (MD) simulations, such as Grid Inhomogeneous Solvation Theory (GIST) or Double Decoupling. On one hand, MD-based methods are prohibitive to use in HTVS to estimate the role of waters on the fly for each ligand. On the other hand, fast and approximate methods show an unsatisfactory level of accuracy, with low agreement with results obtained with the more expensive methods. Here we introduce WaterKit, a new grid-based sampling method with explicit water molecules to calculate thermodynamic properties using the GIST method. Our results show that the discrete placement of water molecules is successful in reproducing the position of crystallographic waters with very high accuracy, as well as providing thermodynamic estimates with accuracy comparable to more expensive MD simulations. Unlike these methods, WaterKit can be used to analyze specific regions on the protein surface, (such as the binding site of a receptor), without having to hydrate and simulate the whole receptor structure. The results show the feasibility of a general and fast method to compute thermodynamic properties of water molecules, making it well-suited to be integrated in high-throughput pipelines such as molecular docking.

Heterogeneous and Allosteric Role of Surface Hydration for Protein-Ligand Binding

Atomistic-level understanding of surface hydration mediating protein-protein interactions and ligand binding has been a challenge due to the dynamic nature of water molecules near the surface. We develop a computational method to evaluate the solvation free energy based on the density map of the first hydration shell constructed from all-atom molecular dynamics simulation and use it to examine the binding of two intrinsically disordered ligands to their target protein domain. One ligand is from the human protein, and the other is from the 1918 Spanish flu virus. We find that the viral ligand incurs a 6.9 kcal/mol lower desolvation penalty upon binding to the target, which is consistent with its stronger binding affinity. The difference arises from the spatially fragmented and nonuniform water density profiles of the first hydration shell. In particular, residues that are distal from the ligand-binding site contribute to a varying extent to the desolvation penalty, among which the "entropy hotspot" residues contribute significantly. Thus, ligand binding alters hydration on remote sites in addition to affecting the binding interface. The nonlocal effect disappears when the conformational motion of the protein is suppressed. The present results elucidate the interplay between protein conformational dynamics and surface hydration. Our approach of measuring the solvation free energy based on the water density of the first hydration shell is tolerant of the conformational fluctuation of protein, and we expect it to be applicable to investigating a broad range of biomolecular interfaces.

Enhanced Grand Canonical Sampling of Occluded Water Sites Using Nonequilibrium Candidate Monte Carlo

Water molecules play a key role in many biomolecular systems, particularly when bound at protein-ligand interfaces. However, molecular simulation studies on such systems are hampered by the relatively long time scales over which water exchange between a protein and solvent takes place. Grand canonical Monte Carlo (GCMC) is a simulation technique that avoids this issue by attempting the insertion and deletion of water molecules within a given structure. The approach is constrained by low acceptance probabilities for insertions in congested systems, however. To address this issue, here, we combine GCMC with nonequilibium candidate Monte Carlo (NCMC) to yield a method that we refer to as grand canonical nonequilibrium candidate Monte Carlo (GCNCMC), in which the water insertions and deletions are carried out in a gradual, nonequilibrium fashion. We validate this new approach by comparing GCNCMC and GCMC simulations of bulk water and three protein binding sites. We find that not only is the efficiency of the water sampling improved by GCNCMC but that it also results in increased sampling of ligand conformations in a protein binding site, revealing new water-mediated ligand-binding geometries that are not observed using alternative enhanced sampling techniques.

Recent PELE Developments and Applications in Drug Discovery Campaigns

Computer simulation techniques are gaining a central role in molecular pharmacology. Due to several factors, including the significant improvements of traditional molecular modelling, the irruption of machine learning methods, the massive data generation, or the unlimited computational resources through cloud computing, the future of pharmacology seems to go hand in hand with in silico predictions. In this review, we summarize our recent efforts in such a direction, centered on the unconventional Monte Carlo PELE software and on its coupling with machine learning techniques. We also provide new data on combining two recent new techniques, aquaPELE capable of exhaustive water sampling and fragPELE, for fragment growing.