Protein-protein interactions encode the wiring diagram of cellular signaling pathways and their deregulations underlie a variety of diseases, such as cancer. Inhibiting protein-protein interactions with peptide derivatives is a promising way to develop new biological and therapeutic tools. Here, we develop a general framework to computationally handle hundreds of non-natural amino acid sidechai...

In this article we compare different force fields that are widely used (Gromacs, Charmm-22/x-Plor, Charmm-27, Amber-1999, OPLS-AA) in biophysical simulations containing aqueous NaCl. We show that the uncertainties of the microscopic parameters of, in particular, sodium, and, to a lesser extent, chloride, translate into large differences in the computed radial-distribution functions. This uncert...

Motivation: Molecular dynamic simulations of membrane systems are an important method for the prediction and analysis of physicochemical properties. The CELLmicrocosmos 2.2 MembraneEditor (CmME) provides a comfortable workflow to generate lipid membranes with different conformations. While CmME is intended to generate molecular structures on desktop and mobile computers in a very short time, th...

Background: Contraceptive vaccines (CVs) can be used as a valuable and alternative method for the prevention of gestation in humans and animals. These vaccines can have several targets, such as superficial sperm proteins. Vaccines based on sperm antigens are quite efficacious to create a contraceptive effect. However, multi-epitope vaccines are more effective in stimulating the immune system an...

We introduce a new Adaptive Integration Approach (AIA) to be used in a wide range of molecular simulations. Given a simulation problem and a step size, the method automatically chooses the optimal scheme out of an available family of numerical integrators. Although we focus on two-stage splitting integrators, the idea may be used with more general families. In each instance, the system-specific...

Ion channels are of universal importance for all cell types and play key roles in cellular physiology and pathology. Increased insight into their functional mechanisms is crucial to enable drug design on this important class of membrane proteins, and to enhance our understanding of some of the fundamental features of cells. This review presents the concepts behind the recently developed simulat...

In order to better understand the origin of life and the production of artificial living organisms and programmable nano-biorobots we used ab initio quantum mechanical (QM) Hartree-Fock (HF), density functional theory (DFT), QM semiempirical PM3 [1, 2} and molecular dynamics (MD) NAMD, GROMACS and CHARMM simulations [3-5] to investigate various bioorganic systems of artificial minimal living or...

Time-resolved X-ray solution scattering is an increasingly popular method to measure conformational changes in proteins. Extracting structural information from the resulting difference X-ray scattering data is a daunting task. We present a method in which the limited but precious information encoded in such scattering curves is combined with the chemical knowledge of molecular force fields. The...