Comparison of implicit solvent models and force fields in molecular dynamics simulations of the PB1 domain

All-Atom MD Predicts Magnesium-Induced Hairpin in Chemically Perturbed RNA Analog of F10 Therapeutic

Given their increasingly frequent usage, understanding the chemical and structural properties which allow therapeutic nucleic acids to promote the death of cancer cells is critical for medical advancement. One molecule of interest is a 10-mer of FdUMP (5-fluoro-2'-deoxyuridine-5'-O-monophosphate) also called F10. To investigate causes of structural stability, we have computationally restored the 2' oxygen on each ribose sugar of the phosphodiester backbone, creating FUMP[10]. Microsecond time-scale, all-atom, simulations of FUMP[10] in the presence of 150 mM MgCl₂ predict that the strand has a 45% probability of folding into a stable hairpin-like secondary structure. Analysis of 16 μs of data reveals phosphate interactions as likely contributors to the stability of this folded state. Comparison with polydT and polyU simulations predicts that FUMP[10]'s lowest order structures last for one to 2 orders of magnitude longer than similar nucleic acid strands. Here we provide a brief structural and conformational analysis of the predicted structures of FUMP[10], and suggest insights into its stability via comparison to F10, polydT, and polyU.

Variational Optimization of an All-Atom Implicit Solvent Force Field to Match Explicit Solvent Simulation Data

The development of accurate implicit solvation models with low computational cost is essential for addressing many large-scale biophysical problems. Here, we present an efficient solvation term based on a Gaussian solvent-exclusion model (EEF1) for simulations of proteins in aqueous environment, with the primary aim of having a good overlap with explicit solvent simulations, particularly for unfolded and disordered states - as would be needed for multiscale applications. In order to achieve this, we have used a recently proposed coarse-graining procedure based on minimization of an entropy-related objective function to train the model to reproduce the equilibrium distribution obtained from explicit water simulations. Via this methodology, we have optimized both a charge screening parameter and a backbone torsion term against explicit solvent simulations of an α-helical and a β-stranded peptide. The performance of the resulting effective energy function, termed EEF1-SB, is tested with respect to the properties of folded proteins, the folding of small peptides or fast-folding proteins, and NMR data for intrinsically disordered proteins. The results show that EEF1-SB provides a reasonable description of a wide range of systems, but its key advantage over other methods tested is that it captures very well the structure and dimension of disordered or weakly structured peptides. EEF1-SB is thus a computationally inexpensive (~ 10 times faster than Generalized-Born methods) and transferable approximation for treating solvent effects.