Theoretical Insights into the Reaction and Inhibition Mechanism of Metal-Independent Retaining Glycosyltransferase Responsible for Mycothiol Biosynthesis.

Understanding enzymatic reactions with atomic resolution has proven in recent years to be of tremendous interest for biochemical research, and thus, the use of QM/MM methods for the study of reaction mechanisms is experiencing a continuous growth. Glycosyltransferases (GTs) catalyze the formation of glycosidic bonds, and are important for many biotechnological purposes, including drug targeting. Their reaction product may result with only one of the two possible stereochemical outcomes for the reacting anomeric center, and therefore, they are classified as either inverting or retaining GTs.

Long-Time-Step Molecular Dynamics through Hydrogen Mass Repartitioning.

Previous studies have shown that the method of hydrogen mass repartitioning (HMR) is a potentially useful tool for accelerating molecular dynamics (MD) simulations. By repartitioning the mass of heavy atoms into the bonded hydrogen atoms, it is possible to slow the highest-frequency motions of the macromolecule under study, thus allowing the time step of the simulation to be increased by up to a factor of 2. In this communication, we investigate further how this mass repartitioning allows the simulation time step to be increased in a stable fashion without significantly increasing discretization error.

Fitting of dihedral terms in classical force fields as an analytic linear least-squares problem.

The derivation and optimization of most energy terms in modern force fields are aided by automated computational tools. It is therefore important to have algorithms to rapidly and precisely train large numbers of interconnected parameters to allow investigators to make better decisions about the content of molecular models. In particular, the traditional approach to deriving dihedral parameters has been a least-squares fit to target conformational energies through variational optimization strategies.