Structural bioinformatics and molecular simulations: Looking at membrane proteins

Structural bioinformatics prediction of membrane-binding proteins.

Membrane-binding peripheral proteins play important roles in many biological processes, including cell signaling and membrane trafficking. Unlike integral membrane proteins, these proteins bind the membrane mostly in a reversible manner. Since peripheral proteins do not have canonical transmembrane segments, it is difficult to identify them from their amino acid sequences. As a first step towar...

Molecular dynamics simulations of membrane proteins under asymmetric ionic concentrations

A computational method is developed to allow molecular dynamics simulations of biomembrane systems under realistic ionic gradients and asymmetric salt concentrations while maintaining the conventional periodic boundary conditions required to minimize finite-size effects in an all-atom explicit solvent representation. The method, which consists of introducing a nonperiodic energy step acting on ...

Convergence of molecular dynamics simulations of membrane proteins.

The central question in evaluating almost any result from a molecular dynamics simulation is whether the calculation has converged. Unfortunately, assessing the ergodicity of a single trajectory is very difficult to do. In this work, we assess the sampling of molecular dynamics simulations of the membrane protein rhodopsin by comparing the results from 26 independent trajectories, each run for ...

Structural Bioinformatics and Molecular Dynamics Simulations Studies of Cathepsins as a Potential Target for Drug Discovery

Prediction of three-dimensional structure of cathepsins, and molecular dynamics simulations of cathepsin S were studied by interaction with the drug molecule with virtual screening 681,158 compounds from ZINC database. The result of study showed top 1 ranked was obtained with drug molecule ZINC 23215439 reaction with cathepsin S. This demonstrates that the active site of cathepsin S Cys25, His1...

Computational Structural Bioinformatics II: Molecular Models