A coarse-grained normal mode approach for macromolecules: an efficient implementation and application to...

A block normal mode (BNM) algorithm, originally proposed by Tama et al., (Proteins Struct. Func. Genet. 41:1-7, 2000) was implemented into the simulation program CHARMM. The BNM approach projects the hessian matrix into local translation/rotation basis vectors and, therefore, dramatically reduces the size of the matrix involved in diagonalization. In the current work, by constructing the atomic hessian elements required in the projection operation on the fly, the memory requirement for the BNM approach has been significantly reduced from that of standard normal mode analysis and previous implementation of BNM. As a result, low frequency modes, which are of interest in large-scale conformational changes of large proteins or protein-nucleic acid complexes, can be readily obtained. Comparison of the BNM results with standard normal mode analysis for a number of small proteins and nucleic acids indicates that many properties dominated by low frequency motions are well reproduced by BNM; these include atomic fluctuations, the displacement covariance matrix, vibrational entropies, and involvement coefficients for conformational transitions. Preliminary application to a fairly large system, Ca(2+)-ATPase (994 residues), is described as an example. The structural flexibility of the cytoplasmic domains (especially domain N), correlated motions among residues on domain interfaces and displacement patterns for the transmembrane helices observed in the BNM results are discussed in relation to the function of Ca(2+)-ATPase. The current implementation of the BNM approach has paved the way for developing efficient sampling algorithms with molecular dynamics or Monte Carlo for studying long-time scale dynamics of macromolecules.