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Now showing 1 - 4 of 4
  • Item
    Krylov subspace methods for computing hydrodynamic interactions in Brownian dynamics simulations
    (Georgia Institute of Technology, 2012-08) Ando, Tadashi ; Chow, Edmond ; Saad, Yousef ; Skolnick, Jeffrey
    Hydrodynamic interactions play an important role in the dynamics of macromolecules. The most common way to take into account hydrodynamic effects in molecular simulations is in the context of a Brownian dynamics simulation. However, the calculation of correlated Brownian noise vectors in these simulations is computationally very demanding and alternative methods are desirable. This paper studies methods based on Krylov subspaces for computing Brownian noise vectors. These methods are related to Chebyshev polynomial approximations, but do not require eigenvalue estimates. We show that only low accuracy is required in the Brownian noise vectors to accurately compute values of dynamic and static properties of polymer and monodisperse suspension models. With this level of accuracy, the computational time of Krylov subspace methods scales very nearly as O(N²) for the number of particles N up to 10 000, which was the limit tested. The performance of the Krylov subspace methods, especially the “block” version, is slightly better than that of the Chebyshev method, even without taking into account the additional cost of eigenvalue estimates required by the latter. Furthermore, at N = 10 000, the Krylov subspace method is 13 times faster than the exact Cholesky method. Thus, Krylov subspace methods are recommended for performing largescale Brownian dynamics simulations with hydrodynamic interactions.
  • Item
    GOAP: A Generalized Orientation-Dependent, All-Atom Statistical Potential for Protein Structure Prediction
    (Georgia Institute of Technology, 2011-10) Zhou, Hongyi ; Skolnick, Jeffrey
    An accurate scoring function is a key component for successful protein structure prediction. To address this important unsolved problem, we develop a generalized orientation and distance-dependent all-atom statistical potential. The new statistical potential, generalized orientation-dependent all-atom potential (GOAP), depends on the relative orientation of the planes associated with each heavy atom in interacting pairs. GOAP is a generalization of previous orientation-dependent potentials that consider only representative atoms or blocks of side-chain or polar atoms. GOAP is decomposed into distance- and angle-dependent contributions. The DFIRE distance-scaled finite ideal gas reference state is employed for the distance-dependent component of GOAP. GOAP was tested on 11 commonly used decoy sets containing 278 targets, and recognized 226 native structures as best from the decoys, whereas DFIRE recognized 127 targets. The major improvement comes from decoy sets that have homology-modeled structures that are close to native (all within ∼4.0 Å) or from the ROSETTA ab initio decoy set. For these two kinds of decoys, orientation-independent DFIRE or only side-chain orientation-dependent RWplus performed poorly. Although the OPUS-PSP block-based orientation-dependent, side-chain atom contact potential performs much better (recognizing 196 targets) than DFIRE, RWplus, and dDFIRE, it is still ∼15% worse than GOAP. Thus, GOAP is a promising advance in knowledge-based, all-atom statistical potentials. GOAP is available for download at http://cssb.biology.gatech.edu/GOAP.
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    Brownian dynamics simulation of macromolecule diffusion in a protocell
    (Georgia Institute of Technology, 2011) Ando, Tadashi ; Skolnick, Jeffrey
    The interiors of all living cells are highly crowded with macro molecules, which differs considerably the thermodynamics and kinetics of biological reactions between in vivo and in vitro. For example, the diffusion of green fluorescent protein (GFP) in E. coli is ~10-fold slower than in dilute conditions. In this study, we performed Brownian dynamics (BD) simulations of rigid macromolecules in a crowded environment mimicking the cytosol of E. coli to study the motions of macromolecules. The simulation systems contained 35 70S ribosomes, 750 glycolytic enzymes, 75 GFPs, and 392 tRNAs in a 100 nm × 100 nm × 100 nm simulation box, where the macromolecules were represented by rigid-objects of one bead per amino acid or four beads per nucleotide models. Diffusion tensors of these molecules in dilute solutions were estimated by using a hydrodynamic theory to take into account the diffusion anisotropy of arbitrary shaped objects in the BD simulations. BD simulations of the system where each macromolecule is represented by its Stokes radius were also performed for comparison. Excluded volume effects greatly reduce the mobility of molecules in crowded environments for both molecular-shaped and equivalent sphere systems. Additionally, there were no significant differences in the reduction of diffusivity over the entire range of molecular size between two systems. However, the reduction in diffusion of GFP in these systems was still 4-5 times larger than for the in vivo experiment. We will discuss other plausible factors that might cause the large reduction in diffusion in vivo.
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    TASSER_WT: A protein structure prediction algorithm with accurate predicted contact restraints for difficult protein targets
    (Georgia Institute of Technology, 2010-11) Lee, Seung Yup ; Skolnick, Jeffrey
    To improve the prediction accuracy in the regime where template alignment quality is poor, an updated version of TASSER_2.0, namely TASSER_WT, was developed. TASSER_WT incorporates more accurate contact restraints from a new method, COMBCON. COMBCON uses confidence-weighted contacts from PROSPECTOR_3.5, the latest version, PROSPECTOR_4, and a new local structural fragment-based threading algorithm, STITCH, implemented in two variants depending on expected fragment prediction accuracy. TASSER_WT is tested on 622 Hard proteins, the most difficult targets (incorrect alignments and/or templates and incorrect side-chain contact restraints) in a comprehensive benchmark of 2591 nonhomologous, single domain proteins %200 residues that cover the PDB at 35% pairwise sequence identity. For 454 of 622 Hard targets, COMBCON provides contact restraints with higher accuracy and number of contacts per residue. As contact coverage with confidence weight R3 (FwtR3 cov) increases, the more improved are TASSER_WT models. When FwtR3 cov > 1.0 and > 0.4, the average root mean-square deviation of TASSER_WT (TASSER_2.0) models is 4.11 A° (6.72 A° ) and 5.03 A° (6.40A° ), respectively. Regarding a structure prediction as successful when a model has a TM-score to the native structureR0.4, when FwtR3 cov > 1.0 and > 0.4, the success rate of TASSER_WT (TASSER_2.0) is 98.8% (76.2%) and 93.7% (81.1%), respectively.