Ligand Binding Free Energies with Adaptive Water Networks: Two-Dimensional Grand Canonical Alchemical Perturbations.

Computational methods to calculate ligand binding affinities are increasing in popularity, due to improvements in simulation algorithms, computational resources, and easy-to-use software. However, issues can arise in relative ligand binding free energy simulations if the ligands considered have different active site water networks, as simulations are typically performed with a predetermined number of water molecules (fixed N ensembles) in preassigned locations. If an alchemical perturbation is attempted where the change should result in a different active site water network, the water molecules may not be able to adapt appropriately within the time scales of the simulations-particularly if the active site is occluded.

Replica-Exchange and Standard State Binding Free Energies with Grand Canonical Monte Carlo.

The ability of grand canonical Monte Carlo (GCMC) to create and annihilate molecules in a given region greatly aids the identification of water sites and water binding free energies in protein cavities. However, acceptance rates without the application of biased moves can be low, resulting in large variations in the observed water occupancies. Here, we show that replica-exchange of the chemical potential significantly reduces the variance of the GCMC data.

A Monte Carlo Resampling Approach for the Calculation of Hybrid Classical and Quantum Free Energies.

Hybrid free energy methods allow estimation of free energy differences at the quantum mechanics (QM) level with high efficiency by performing sampling at the classical mechanics (MM) level. Various approaches to allow the calculation of QM corrections to classical free energies have been proposed. The single step free energy perturbation approach starts with a classically generated ensemble, a subset of structures of which are postprocessed to obtain QM energies for use with the Zwanzig equation.

Direct validation of the single step classical to quantum free energy perturbation.

The use of the Zwanzig equation in the calculation of single-step perturbations to provide first-principles (ab initio) quantum mechanics (QM) correction terms to molecular mechanics (MM) free energy cycles is well established. A rigorous test of the ability to converge such calculations would be very useful in this context. In this work, we perform a direct assessment of the convergence of the MM to QM perturbation, by attempting the reverse QM to MM perturbation.