Abstract
| - A hydrophobic aided replica exchange method (HAREM) is introduced to accelerate the simulation of all-atom protein folding in explicit solvent. This method is based on exaggerating the hydrophobic effect ofvarious protein amino acids in water by attenuating the protein−water attractive interactions (mimicking theChaperon effect) while leaving other interactions among protein atoms and water molecules unchanged. Themethod is applied to a small representative protein, the α-helix 3K(I), and it is found that the HAREM methodsuccessfully folds the protein within 4 ns, while the regular replica exchange method does not fold the sameprotein within 5 ns, even with many more replicas.
|