scholarly journals Bottom-Up Coarse-Grained Modeling of DNA

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tiedong Sun ◽  
Vishal Minhas ◽  
Nikolay Korolev ◽  
Alexander Mirzoev ◽  
Alexander P. Lyubartsev ◽  
...  

Recent advances in methodology enable effective coarse-grained modeling of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) based on underlying atomistic force field simulations. The so-called bottom-up coarse-graining practice separates fast and slow dynamic processes in molecular systems by averaging out fast degrees of freedom represented by the underlying fine-grained model. The resulting effective potential of interaction includes the contribution from fast degrees of freedom effectively in the form of potential of mean force. The pair-wise additive potential is usually adopted to construct the coarse-grained Hamiltonian for its efficiency in a computer simulation. In this review, we present a few well-developed bottom-up coarse-graining methods, discussing their application in modeling DNA properties such as DNA flexibility (persistence length), conformation, “melting,” and DNA condensation.

Proceedings ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 27
Author(s):  
Evangelia Kalligiannaki ◽  
Vagelis Harmandaris ◽  
Markos Katsoulakis

The development of systematic coarse-grained mesoscopic models for complex molecular systems is an intense research area. Here we first give an overview of different methods for obtaining optimal parametrized coarse-grained models, starting from detailed atomistic representation for high dimensional molecular systems. We focus on methods based on information theory, such as relative entropy, showing that they provide parameterizations of coarse-grained models at equilibrium by minimizing a fitting functional over a parameter space. We also connect them with structural-based (inverse Boltzmann) and force matching methods. All the methods mentioned in principle are employed to approximate a many-body potential, the (n-body) potential of mean force, describing the equilibrium distribution of coarse-grained sites observed in simulations of atomically detailed models. We also present in a mathematically consistent way the entropy and force matching methods and their equivalence, which we derive for general nonlinear coarse-graining maps. We apply, and compare, the above-described methodologies in several molecular systems: A simple fluid (methane), water and a polymer (polyethylene) bulk system. Finally, for the latter we also provide reliable confidence intervals using a statistical analysis resampling technique, the bootstrap method.


2010 ◽  
Vol 43 (3) ◽  
pp. 333-371 ◽  
Author(s):  
Valentina Tozzini

AbstractThe last decade has witnessed a renewed interest in the coarse-grained (CG) models for biopolymers, also stimulated by the needs of modern molecular biology, dealing with nano- to micro-sized bio-molecular systems and larger than microsecond timescale. This combination of size and timescale is, in fact, hard to access by atomic-based simulations. Coarse graining the system is a route to be followed to overcome these limits, but the ways of practically implementing it are many and different, making the landscape of CG models very vast and complex.In this paper, the CG models are reviewed and their features, applications and performances compared. This analysis, restricted to proteins, focuses on the minimalist models, namely those reducing at minimum the number of degrees of freedom without losing the possibility of explicitly describing the secondary structures. This class includes models using a single or a few interacting centers (beads) for each amino acid.From this analysis several issues emerge. The difficulty in building these models resides in the need for combining transferability/predictive power with the capability of accurately reproducing the structures. It is shown that these aspects could be optimized by accurately choosing the force field (FF) terms and functional forms, and combining different parameterization procedures. In addition, in spite of the variety of the minimalist models, regularities can be found in the parameters values and in FF terms. These are outlined and schematically presented with the aid of a generic phase diagram of the polypeptide in the parameter space and, hopefully, could serve as guidelines for the development of minimalist models incorporating the maximum possible level of predictive power and structural accuracy.


Author(s):  
Xiaoyong Cao ◽  
Pu Tian

Molecular modeling is widely utilized in subjects including but not limited to physics, chemistry, biology, materials science and engineering. Impressive progress has been made in development of theories, algorithms and software packages. To divide and conquer, and to cache intermediate results have been long standing principles in development of algorithms. Not surprisingly, Most of important methodological advancements in more than half century of molecule modeling are various implementations of these two fundamental principles. In the mainstream classical computational molecular science based on force fields parameterization by coarse graining, tremendous efforts have been invested on two lines of algorithm development. The first is coarse graining, which is to represent multiple basic particles in higher resolution modeling as a single larger and softer particle in lower resolution counterpart, with resulting force fields of partial transferability at the expense of some information loss. The second is enhanced sampling, which realizes "dividing and conquering" and/or "caching" in configurational space with focus either on reaction coordinates and collective variables as in metadynamics and related algorithms, or on the transition matrix and state discretization as in Markov state models. For this line of algorithms, spatial resolution is maintained but no transferability is available. Deep learning has been utilized to realize more efficient and accurate ways of "dividing and conquering" and "caching" along these two lines of algorithmic research. We proposed and demonstrated the local free energy landscape approach, a new framework for classical computational molecular science and a third class of algorithm that facilitates molecular modeling through partially transferable in resolution "caching" of distributions for local clusters of molecular degrees of freedom. Differences, connections and potential interactions among these three algorithmic directions are discussed, with the hope to stimulate development of more elegant, efficient and reliable formulations and algorithms for "dividing and conquering" and "caching" in complex molecular systems.


2020 ◽  
Vol 117 (39) ◽  
pp. 24061-24068 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas T. Foley ◽  
Katherine M. Kidder ◽  
M. Scott Shell ◽  
W. G. Noid

The success of any physical model critically depends upon adopting an appropriate representation for the phenomenon of interest. Unfortunately, it remains generally challenging to identify the essential degrees of freedom or, equivalently, the proper order parameters for describing complex phenomena. Here we develop a statistical physics framework for exploring and quantitatively characterizing the space of order parameters for representing physical systems. Specifically, we examine the space of low-resolution representations that correspond to particle-based coarse-grained (CG) models for a simple microscopic model of protein fluctuations. We employ Monte Carlo (MC) methods to sample this space and determine the density of states for CG representations as a function of their ability to preserve the configurational information, I, and large-scale fluctuations, Q, of the microscopic model. These two metrics are uncorrelated in high-resolution representations but become anticorrelated at lower resolutions. Moreover, our MC simulations suggest an emergent length scale for coarse-graining proteins, as well as a qualitative distinction between good and bad representations of proteins. Finally, we relate our work to recent approaches for clustering graphs and detecting communities in networks.


Soft Matter ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 15 (38) ◽  
pp. 7567-7582 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shu Wang ◽  
Zhen Li ◽  
Wenxiao Pan

We present a bottom-up coarse-graining (CG) method to establish implicit-solvent CG modeling for polymers in solution, which conserves the dynamic properties of the reference microscopic system.


Author(s):  
Sebastião Miranda ◽  
Jonas Feldt ◽  
Frederico Pratas ◽  
Ricardo A Mata ◽  
Nuno Roma ◽  
...  

A novel perturbative Monte Carlo mixed quantum mechanics (QM)/molecular mechanics (MM) approach has been recently developed to simulate molecular systems in complex environments. However, the required accuracy to efficiently simulate such complex molecular systems is usually granted at the cost of long executing times. To alleviate this problem, a new parallelization strategy of multi-level Monte Carlo molecular simulations is herein proposed for heterogeneous systems. It simultaneously exploits fine-grained (at the data level), coarse-grained (at the Markov chain level) and task-grained (pure QM, pure MM and QM/MM procedures) parallelism to ensure an efficient execution in heterogeneous systems composed of central processing units and multiple and possibly different graphical processing units. This is achieved by making use of the OpenCL library, together with appropriate dynamic load balancing schemes. From the conducted evaluation with real benchmarking data, a speed-up of 56x in the computational bottleneck part was observed, which results in a global speed-up of 38x for the whole simulation, reducing the time of a typical simulation from 80 hours to only 2 hours.


2021 ◽  
Vol 22 (9) ◽  
pp. 5053
Author(s):  
Xiaoyong Cao ◽  
Pu Tian

Molecular modeling is widely utilized in subjects including but not limited to physics, chemistry, biology, materials science and engineering. Impressive progress has been made in development of theories, algorithms and software packages. To divide and conquer, and to cache intermediate results have been long standing principles in development of algorithms. Not surprisingly, most important methodological advancements in more than half century of molecular modeling are various implementations of these two fundamental principles. In the mainstream classical computational molecular science, tremendous efforts have been invested on two lines of algorithm development. The first is coarse graining, which is to represent multiple basic particles in higher resolution modeling as a single larger and softer particle in lower resolution counterpart, with resulting force fields of partial transferability at the expense of some information loss. The second is enhanced sampling, which realizes “dividing and conquering” and/or “caching” in configurational space with focus either on reaction coordinates and collective variables as in metadynamics and related algorithms, or on the transition matrix and state discretization as in Markov state models. For this line of algorithms, spatial resolution is maintained but results are not transferable. Deep learning has been utilized to realize more efficient and accurate ways of “dividing and conquering” and “caching” along these two lines of algorithmic research. We proposed and demonstrated the local free energy landscape approach, a new framework for classical computational molecular science. This framework is based on a third class of algorithm that facilitates molecular modeling through partially transferable in resolution “caching” of distributions for local clusters of molecular degrees of freedom. Differences, connections and potential interactions among these three algorithmic directions are discussed, with the hope to stimulate development of more elegant, efficient and reliable formulations and algorithms for “dividing and conquering” and “caching” in complex molecular systems.


2022 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Huang ◽  
Huong Nguyen

We derive a systematic and general method for parametrizing coarse-grained molecular models consisting of anisotropic particles from fine-grained (e.g. all-atom) models for condensed-phase molecular dynamics simulations. The method, which we call anisotropic force-matching coarse-graining (AFM-CG), is based on rigorous statistical mechanical principles, enforcing consistency between the coarse-grained and fine-grained phase-space distributions to derive equations for the coarse-grained forces, masses, and moments of inertia in terms of properties of a condensed-phase fine-grained system. We verify the accuracy and efficiency of the method by coarse-graining liquid-state systems of two different anisotropic organic molecules, benzene and perylene, and show that the parametrized coarse-grained models more accurately describe properties of these systems than previous anisotropic coarse-grained models parametrized using other methods that do not account for finite-temperature and many-body effects on the condensed-phase coarse-grained interactions. The AFM-CG method will be useful for developing accurate and efficient dynamical simulation models of condensed-phase systems of molecules consisting of large, rigid, anisotropic fragments, such as nucleic acids, liquid crystals, and organic semiconductors.


Author(s):  
Kentaro Doi ◽  
Tomoaki Haga ◽  
Hirofumi Shintaku ◽  
Satoyuki Kawano

Recently, analytical techniques have been developed for detecting single-nucleotide polymorphisms in DNA sequences. Improvements of the sequence identification techniques has attracted much attention in several fields. However, there are many things that have not been clarified about DNA. In the present study, we have developed a coarse-graining DNA model with single-nucleotide resolution, in which potential functions for hydrogen bonds and the π -stack effect are taken into account. Using Langevin-dynamics simulations, several characteristics of the coarse-grained DNA have been clarified. The validity of the present model has been confirmed, compared with other experimental and computational results. In particular, the melting temperature and persistence length are in good agreement with the experimental results for a wide range of salt concentrations.


Computation ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 42 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph F. Rudzinski

Coarse-grained (CG) models can provide computationally efficient and conceptually simple characterizations of soft matter systems. While generic models probe the underlying physics governing an entire family of free-energy landscapes, bottom-up CG models are systematically constructed from a higher-resolution model to retain a high level of chemical specificity. The removal of degrees of freedom from the system modifies the relationship between the relative time scales of distinct dynamical processes through both a loss of friction and a “smoothing” of the free-energy landscape. While these effects typically result in faster dynamics, decreasing the computational expense of the model, they also obscure the connection to the true dynamics of the system. The lack of consistent dynamics is a serious limitation for CG models, which not only prevents quantitatively accurate predictions of dynamical observables but can also lead to qualitatively incorrect descriptions of the characteristic dynamical processes. With many methods available for optimizing the structural and thermodynamic properties of chemically-specific CG models, recent years have seen a stark increase in investigations addressing the accurate description of dynamical properties generated from CG simulations. In this review, we present an overview of these efforts, ranging from bottom-up parameterizations of generalized Langevin equations to refinements of the CG force field based on a Markov state modeling framework. We aim to make connections between seemingly disparate approaches, while laying out some of the major challenges as well as potential directions for future efforts.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document