Koby S Benjamin, Gutkin Evgeny, Patel Shree, Kurnikova Maria G
Department of Chemistry, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 15213, United States.
J Chem Inf Model. 2025 May 26;65(10):4932-4951. doi: 10.1021/acs.jcim.4c02107. Epub 2025 May 6.
Computing the free energy of protein-ligand binding by employing molecular dynamics (MD) simulations is becoming a valuable tool in the early stages of drug discovery. However, the cost and complexity of such simulations are often prohibitive for high-throughput studies. We present an automated workflow for the thermodynamic integration scheme with the "on-the-fly" optimization of computational resource allocation for each λ-window of both relative and absolute binding free energy simulations. This iterative workflow utilizes automatic equilibration detection and convergence testing via the Jensen-Shannon distance to determine optimal simulation stopping points in an entirely data-driven manner. It is broadly applicable to multiple free energy calculations, such as ligand binding, amino acid mutations, and others, while utilizing different estimators, e.g., free energy perturbation, BAR, MBAR, etc. We benchmark our workflow on the well-characterized systems, namely, cyclin-dependent kinase 2 and T4 lysozyme L99A/M102Q mutant, and the more flexible SARS-CoV-2 papain-like protease. We demonstrate that this proposed protocol can achieve more than 85% reduction in computational expense while maintaining similar levels of accuracy compared to other benchmarking protocols. We examine the performance of this protocol on both small and large molecular transformations. The cost-accuracy tradeoff of repeated runs is also investigated.
通过分子动力学(MD)模拟计算蛋白质-配体结合的自由能,正成为药物发现早期阶段一种有价值的工具。然而,此类模拟的成本和复杂性对于高通量研究来说往往过高。我们提出了一种用于热力学积分方案的自动化工作流程,该流程针对相对和绝对结合自由能模拟的每个λ窗口进行计算资源分配的“即时”优化。这种迭代工作流程通过詹森-香农距离利用自动平衡检测和收敛测试,以完全数据驱动的方式确定最佳模拟停止点。它广泛适用于多种自由能计算,如配体结合、氨基酸突变等,同时可使用不同的估计器,例如自由能微扰、BAR、MBAR等。我们在特征明确的系统上对我们的工作流程进行基准测试,即细胞周期蛋白依赖性激酶2和T4溶菌酶L99A/M102Q突变体,以及更具柔性的严重急性呼吸综合征冠状病毒2(SARS-CoV-2)木瓜样蛋白酶。我们证明,与其他基准测试方案相比,该提议的方案在保持相似精度水平的同时,可将计算成本降低85%以上。我们研究了该方案在小分子和大分子转化方面的性能。还研究了重复运行的成本-精度权衡。