Evaluating molecular mechanical potentials for helical peptides and proteins.

Multiple variants of the AMBER all-atom force field were quantitatively evaluated with respect to their ability to accurately characterize helix-coil equilibria in explicit solvent simulations. Using a global distributed computing network, absolute conformational convergence was achieved for large ensembles of the capped A(21) and F(s) helical peptides. Further assessment of these AMBER variants was conducted via simulations of a flexible 164-residue five-helix-bundle protein, apolipophorin-III, on the 100 ns timescale.

Equilibrium conformational dynamics in an RNA tetraloop from massively parallel molecular dynamics.

Conformational equilibrium within the ubiquitous GNRA tetraloop motif was simulated at the ensemble level, including 10 000 independent all-atom molecular dynamics trajectories totaling over 110 micros of simulation time. This robust sampling reveals a highly dynamic structure comprised of 15 conformational microstates. We assemble a Markov model that includes transitions ranging from the nanosecond to microsecond timescales and is dominated by six key loop conformations that contribute to fluctuations around the native state.