Driving forces for transmembrane alpha-helix oligomerization.

We present what we believe to be a novel statistical contact potential based on solved structures of transmembrane (TM) alpha-helical bundles, and we use this contact potential to investigate the amino acid likelihood of stabilizing helix-helix interfaces. To increase statistical significance, we have reduced the full contact energy matrix to a four-flavor alphabet of amino acids, automatically determined by our methodology, in which we find that polarity is a more dominant factor of group identity than is size, with charged or polar groups most often occupying the same face, whereas polar/apolar residue pairs tend to occupy opposite faces. We found that the most polar residues strongly influence interhelical contact formation, although they occur rarely in TM helical bundles.

An implicit solvent coarse-grained lipid model with correct stress profile.

We develop a coarse-grained parametrization strategy for lipid membranes that we illustrate for a dipalmitoylphosphatidylcholine bilayer. Our coarse-graining approach eliminates the high cost of explicit solvent but maintains more lipid interaction sites. We use a broad attractive tail-tail potential and extract realistic bonded potentials of mean force from all-atom simulations, resulting in a model with a sharp gel to fluid transition, a correct bending modulus, and overall very reasonable dynamics when compared with experiment.

Predicting accurate electronic excitation transfer rates via marcus theory with Boys or Edmiston-Ruedenberg localized diabatization.

We model the triplet-triplet energy-transfer experiments from the Closs group [ Closs , G. L. ; et al.