The time scales and pathways of heme cooling in both reduced cytochrome c and oxidized cytochrome c following heme photoexcitation were studied using molecular dynamics simulation. Five different solvent models, including normal water, heavy water, normal glycerol, deuterated glycerol, and a nonpolar solvent, were used in the simulation. Single exponential decay of the excess kinetic energy of ...

The conformation of a polymer chain in solution is intrinsically coupled to the thermodynamic and structural properties of the solvent. Here we study such solvent effects in a system consisting of a flexible interaction-site n-mer chain immersed in a monomeric solvent. Chain conformation is described with a set of intramolecular site-site probability functions. We derive an exact density expans...

In many M.D. simulations the simulated system consists of a single macromolecule in a solvent. Usually, one is not interested in the behaviour of the solvent, so, the CPU time may be minimized by minimizing the amount of solvent. For a given molecule and cut-off radius this may be done by constructing a computational box with near minimal volume. In this article a method is presented to constru...

The solvation energy and entropy at infinite dilution consist of a solute-solvent term and a solvent reorganization term representing the contributions of changes in solvent structure upon solute insertion. In the standard, homogeneous treatment of solutions, changes in solvent structure are expressed through derivatives of the homogeneous pair correlation function, which are very difficult to ...

The molecular dynamics (MD) simulation method is used to assess structural details for humanprion protein (hereafter PrPN) and its Asp178 Asn mutant (hereafter PrPm) which causes fatalfamilial insomnia disease. The results reveal that the flexibility and instability increase in PrPmcould be related to specific amino acids exposed to the solvent. Solvation free energy of PrPm is 20kjmot1nni2 mor...

The properties of the solvent affect the behavior of the solution. We propose a model that accounts for the contribution of the solvent free energy to the free energy of globular proteins in solution. For the case of an attractive square-well potential, we obtain an exact mapping of the phase diagram of this model without solvent to the model that includes the solute-solvent contribution. In pa...

Recently we reported a combined QM/MM approach to estimate condensed-phase values of atomic polarizabilities for use in (bio)molecular simulation. The setup relies on a MM treatment of the solvent when determining atomic polarizabilities to describe the response of a QM described solute to its external electric field. In this work, we study the effect of using alternative descriptions of the so...

In order to study solvation effects on protein folding, we analyze the collapse transition of a self-avoiding random walk composed of hydrophobic segments that is embedded in a lattice model of a solvent. As expected, hydrophobic interactions lead to an attractive potential of mean force among chain segments. As a consequence, the random walk in solvent undergoes a collapse transition at a high...

The diffusion behavior of methanol in different critical media (n-pentane, n-hexane, n-heptane and acetone) was investigated by the Monte Carlo (MC) method. From the simulation results, the diffusion constant of methanol molecule in the critical n-hexane is much larger than those in n-pentane, n-heptane and acetone. By analyzing the microscopic configurations of the critical mixtures, it is fou...

Implicit solvent-based methods play an increasingly important role in molecular modeling of biomolecular structure and dynamics. Recent methodological developments have mainly focused on the extension of the generalized Born (GB) formalism for variable dielectric environments and accurate treatment of nonpolar solvation. Extensive efforts in parameterization of GB models and implicit solvent fo...