DESP: Deep Enhanced Sampling of Proteins’ Conformation Spaces Using AI-Inspired Biasing Forces

The molecular structures (i.e., conformation spaces, CS) of bio-macromolecules and the dynamics that molecules exhibit are crucial to the understanding of the basis of many diseases and in the continuous attempts to retarget known drugs/medications, improve the efficacy of existing drugs, or develop novel drugs. These make a better understanding and the exploration of the CS of molecules a research hotspot. While it is generally easy to computationally explore the CS of small molecules (such as peptides and ligands), the exploration of the CS of a larger biomolecule beyond the local energy well and beyond the initial equilibrium structure of the molecule is generally nontrivial and can often be computationally prohibitive for molecules of considerable size. Therefore, research efforts in this area focus on the development of ways that systematically favor the sampling of new conformations while penalizing the resampling of previously sampled conformations. In this work, we present Deep Enhanced Sampling of Proteins’ Conformation Spaces Using AI-Inspired Biasing Forces (DESP), a technique for enhanced sampling that combines molecular dynamics (MD) simulations and deep neural networks (DNNs), in which biasing potentials for guiding the MD simulations are derived from the KL divergence between the DNN-learned latent space vectors of [a] the most recently sampled conformation and those of [b] the previously sampled conformations. Overall, DESP efficiently samples wide CS and outperforms conventional MD simulations as well as accelerated MD simulations. We acknowledge that this is an actively evolving research area, and we continue to further develop the techniques presented here and their derivatives tailored at achieving DNN-enhanced steered MD simulations and DNN-enhanced targeted MD simulations.