Fluctuation Flooding Method (FFM) for accelerating conformational transitions of proteins

J Chem Phys. 2014 Mar 28;140(12):125103. doi: 10.1063/1.4869594.

Abstract

A powerful conformational sampling method for accelerating structural transitions of proteins, "Fluctuation Flooding Method (FFM)," is proposed. In FFM, cycles of the following steps enhance the transitions: (i) extractions of largely fluctuating snapshots along anisotropic modes obtained from trajectories of multiple independent molecular dynamics (MD) simulations and (ii) conformational re-sampling of the snapshots via re-generations of initial velocities when re-starting MD simulations. In an application to bacteriophage T4 lysozyme, FFM successfully accelerated the open-closed transition with the 6 ns simulation starting solely from the open state, although the 1-μs canonical MD simulation failed to sample such a rare event.

MeSH terms

  • Bacteriophage T4 / enzymology*
  • Molecular Dynamics Simulation*
  • Muramidase / chemistry*
  • Muramidase / metabolism
  • Protein Conformation

Substances

  • Muramidase