Protein-Ligand Dissociation Simulated by Parallel Cascade Selection Molecular Dynamics

J Chem Theory Comput. 2018 Jan 9;14(1):404-417. doi: 10.1021/acs.jctc.7b00504. Epub 2017 Dec 8.

Abstract

We investigated the dissociation process of tri-N-acetyl-d-glucosamine from hen egg white lysozyme using parallel cascade selection molecular dynamics (PaCS-MD), which comprises cycles of multiple unbiased MD simulations using a selection of MD snapshots as the initial structures for the next cycle. Dissociation was significantly accelerated by PaCS-MD, in which the probability of rare event occurrence toward dissociation was enhanced by the selection and rerandomization of the initial velocities. Although this complex was stable during 1 μs of conventional MD, PaCS-MD easily induced dissociation within 100-101 ns. We found that velocity rerandomization enhances the dissociation of triNAG from the bound state, whereas diffusion plays a more important role in the unbound state. We calculated the dissociation free energy by analyzing all PaCS-MD trajectories using the Markov state model (MSM), compared the results to those obtained by combinations of PaCS-MD and umbrella sampling (US), steered MD (SMD) and US, and SMD and the Jarzynski equality, and experimentally determined binding free energy. PaCS-MD/MSM yielded results most comparable to the experimentally determined binding free energy, independent of simulation parameter variations, and also gave the lowest standard errors.

MeSH terms

  • Animals
  • Chickens
  • Ligands
  • Markov Chains
  • Molecular Dynamics Simulation*
  • Muramidase / chemistry*
  • Trisaccharides / chemistry*

Substances

  • Ligands
  • Trisaccharides
  • N,N',N''-triacetylchitotriose
  • hen egg lysozyme
  • Muramidase