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Dipeptide Aggregation in Aqueous Solution from Fixed Point-Charge Force Fields

[Image: see text] The description of aggregation processes with molecular dynamics simulations is a playground for testing biomolecular force fields, including a new generation of force fields that explicitly describe electronic polarization. In this work, we study a system consisting of 50 glycyl-l...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Götz, Andreas W., Bucher, Denis, Lindert, Steffen, McCammon, J. Andrew
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: American Chemical Society 2014
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3986234/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24803868
http://dx.doi.org/10.1021/ct401049q
Descripción
Sumario:[Image: see text] The description of aggregation processes with molecular dynamics simulations is a playground for testing biomolecular force fields, including a new generation of force fields that explicitly describe electronic polarization. In this work, we study a system consisting of 50 glycyl-l-alanine (Gly-Ala) dipeptides in solution with 1001 water molecules. Neutron diffraction experiments have shown that at this concentration, Gly-Ala aggregates into large clusters. However, general-purpose force fields in combination with established water models can fail to correctly describe this aggregation process, highlighting important deficiencies in how solute–solute and solute–solvent interactions are parametrized in these force fields. We found that even for the fully polarizable AMOEBA force field, the degree of association is considerably underestimated. Instead, a fixed point-charge approach based on the newly developed IPolQ scheme [Cerutti et al. J. Phys. Chem.2013, 117, 2328] allows for the correct modeling of the dipeptide aggregation in aqueous solution. This result should stimulate interest in novel fitting schemes that aim to improve the description of the solvent polarization effect within both explicitly polarizable and fixed point-charge frameworks.