Publication date: Sep 28, 2020
One of the main applications of atomistic computer simulations is the calculation of ligand binding free energies. The accuracy of these calculations depends on the force field quality and on the thoroughness of configuration sampling. Sampling is an obstacle in simulations due to the frequent appearance of kinetic bottlenecks in the free energy landscape. Very often this difficulty is circumvented by enhanced sampling techniques. Typically, these techniques depend on the introduction of appropriate collective variables that are meant to capture the system's degrees of freedom. In ligand binding, water has long been known to play a key role, but its complex behaviour has proven difficult to fully capture. In this paper we combine machine learning with physical intuition to build a non-local and highly efficient water-describing collective variable. We use it to study a set of of host-guest systems from the SAMPL5 challenge. We obtain highly accurate binding free energies and good agreement with experiments. The role of water during the binding process is then analysed in some detail.
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File name | Size | Description |
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Deep-LDA_SAMPL5.zip
MD5md5:16de2c2cd867afff3bbb7e4e54063851
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3.3 GiB | Compressed input files for all the investigated systems in the paper. For each case, one trajectory with the corresponding collective variables output is provided. |
README.txt
MD5md5:cb78637dfc2a1a7e33f5bd45e9fe3d70
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1.5 KiB | README file |
2020.112 (version v1) [This version] | Sep 28, 2020 | DOI10.24435/materialscloud:p3-1x |