Critical Evaluation of Polarizable and Nonpolarizable Force Fields for Proteins Using Experimentally Derived Nitrile Electric Fields.

Autor: Kirsh JM; Department of Chemistry, Stanford University, Stanford, California 94305-5012, United States., Weaver JB; Department of Chemistry, Stanford University, Stanford, California 94305-5012, United States., Boxer SG; Department of Chemistry, Stanford University, Stanford, California 94305-5012, United States., Kozuch J; Experimental Molecular Biophysics, Department of Physics, Freie Universität Berlin, 14195 Berlin, Germany.
Jazyk: angličtina
Zdroj: Journal of the American Chemical Society [J Am Chem Soc] 2024 Mar 13; Vol. 146 (10), pp. 6983-6991. Date of Electronic Publication: 2024 Feb 28.
DOI: 10.1021/jacs.3c14775
Abstrakt: Molecular dynamics (MD) simulations are frequently carried out for proteins to investigate the role of electrostatics in their biological function. The choice of force field (FF) can significantly alter the MD results, as the simulated local electrostatic interactions lack benchmarking in the absence of appropriate experimental methods. We recently reported that the transition dipole moment (TDM) of the popular nitrile vibrational probe varies linearly with the environmental electric field, overcoming well-known hydrogen bonding (H-bonding) issues for the nitrile frequency and, thus, enabling the unambiguous measurement of electric fields in proteins ( J. Am. Chem. Soc. 2022 , 144 (17), 7562-7567). Herein, we utilize this new strategy to enable comparisons of experimental and simulated electric fields in protein environments. Specifically, previously determined TDM electric fields exerted onto nitrile-containing o -cyanophenylalanine residues in photoactive yellow protein are compared with MD electric fields from the fixed-charge AMBER FF and the polarizable AMOEBA FF. We observe that the electric field distributions for H-bonding nitriles are substantially affected by the choice of FF. As such, AMBER underestimates electric fields for nitriles experiencing moderate field strengths; in contrast, AMOEBA robustly recapitulates the TDM electric fields. The FF dependence of the electric fields can be partly explained by the presence of additional negative charge density along the nitrile bond axis in AMOEBA, which is due to the inclusion of higher-order multipole parameters; this, in turn, begets more head-on nitrile H-bonds. We conclude by discussing the implications of the FF dependence for the simulation of nitriles and proteins in general.
Databáze: MEDLINE