Enhanced Conformational Sampling of Nanobody CDR H3 Loop by Generalized Replica-Exchange with Solute Tempering

The variable domains of heavy-chain antibodies, known as nanobodies, are potential substitutes for IgG antibodies. They have similar affinities to antigens as antibodies, but are more heat resistant. Their small size allows us to exploit computational approaches for structural modeling or design. Here, we investigate the applicability of an enhanced sampling method, a generalized replica-exchange with solute tempering (gREST) for sampling CDR-H3 loop structures of nanobodies. In the conventional replica-exchange methods, temperatures of only a whole system or scaling parameters of a solute molecule are selected for temperature or parameter exchange. In gREST, we can flexibly select a part of a solute molecule and a part of the potential energy terms as a parameter exchange region. We selected the CDR-H3 loop and investigated which potential energy term should be selected for the efficient sampling of the loop structures. We found that the gREST with dihedral terms can explore a global conformational space, but the relaxation to the global equilibrium is slow. On the other hand, gREST with all the potential energy terms can sample the equilibrium distribution, but the structural exploration is slower than with dihedral terms. The lessons learned from this study can be applied to future studies of loop modeling.