We study helix-coil transitions in an all-atom model of polyalanine. Molecules of up to length 30 residues are investigated by multicanonical simulations. Results from two implicit solvent models are compared with each other and with that from simulations in gas phase. While the helix-coil transition is in all three models a true thermodynamic phase transition, we find that its strength is redu...

Intrinsically disordered proteins that populate the so-called "Dark Proteome" offer challenging benchmarks of atomistic simulation methods to accurately model conformational transitions on a multidimensional energy landscape. This work explores the application of parallel tempering with implicit solvent models as a computational framework to capture the conformational ensemble of an intrinsical...

Coarse-grained models of soft matter are usually combined with implicit solvent models that take the electrostatic polarizability into account via a dielectric background. In biophysical or nanoscale simulations that include water, this constant can vary greatly within the system. Performing molecular dynamics or other simulations that need to compute exact electrostatic interactions between ch...

Implicit solvent models for biomolecular simulations are reviewed and their underlying statistical mechanical basis is discussed. The fundamental quantity that implicit models seek to approximate is the solute potential of mean force, which determines the statistical weight of solute conformations, and which is obtained by averaging over the solvent degrees of freedom. It is possible to express...

The goal of this work is the development of novel peptides with high efficacy of inhibiting activity of CDK6/CyclinD complex. The peptides were derived from primary sequence of P16 protein and its homologues. The interactions between CDK6 and P16/INK4a-derived peptides are studied with molecular dynamics simulation employing umbrella sampling method. The SASA implicit solvent model was used for...

Successful applications of molecular dynamics ( MD ) to study the structure and function of a biomolecule depend on the quality of the underlying force fi eld and the sampling effi ciency of the simulation protocol. In particular, an accurate representation of the aqueous solvent environment is important to reproduce the structural, functional, and dynamic behavior of soluble biomolecule s. The...

The prevalence of salt bridges across protein binding interfaces is surprising given the significant costs of desolvating the two charged groups upon binding. These desolvation costs, which are difficult to examine using laboratory experiments, have been computed in previous studies using the Poisson-Boltzmann (PB) implicit solvent model. Here, for the first time, we directly compare the PB imp...

Coarse-grained modeling and efficient computer simulations are critical to the study of complex molecular processes with many degrees freedom multiple spatiotemporal scales. Variational implicit-solvent model (VISM) for biomolecular solvation is such a framework, its initial success has been demonstrated consistently. In VISM, an effective free-energy functional solute-solvent interfaces minimi...

The ability to accurately model solvent effects on free energy surfaces is important for understanding many biophysical processes including protein folding and misfolding, allosteric transitions, and protein–ligand binding. Although all-atom simulations in explicit solvent can provide an accurate model for biomolecules in solution, explicit solvent simulations are hampered by the slow equilibra...

We have combined graphics processing unit-accelerated all-atom molecular dynamics with parallel tempering to explore the folding properties of small peptides in implicit solvent on the time scale of microseconds. We applied this methodology to the synthetic β-hairpin, trpzip2, and one of its sequence variants, W2W9. Each simulation consisted of over 8 μs of aggregated virtual time. Several meas...