LDRD Final Report (08-ERD-037): Important Modes to Drive Protein MD Simulations to the Next Conformational Level

Every action in biology is performed by dynamic proteins that convert between multiple states in order to engage their functions. Often binding to various ligands is essential for the rates of desired transitions to be enhanced. The goal of computational biology is to study these transitions and discover the different states to fully understand the protein's normal and diseased function, design drugs to target/bias specific states, and understand all of the interactions in between. We have developed a new methodology that is capable of calculating the absolute free energy of proteins while taking into account all the interactions with the solvent molecules. The efficiency of the new scheme is an order of magnitude greater than any existing technique. This method is now implemented in the massively parallel popular MD program package NAMD. This now makes it possible to calculate the relative stability of different conformational states of biological macromolecules as well as their binding free energies to various ligands