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Updated: Aug 11, 2026

Synthesizing Amino Acids Modified with Reactive Carbonyls in Silico to Assess Structural Effects Using Molecular Dynamics Simulations
Published on: April 26, 2024
Deprotonation of solvated formic acid: Car-Parrinello and metadynamics simulations
Jung-Goo Lee1, Eliana Asciutto, Volodymyr Babin
1Center for High Performance Simulations (CHiPS) and Department of Physics, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, North Carolina 27695, USA.
Abstract:
The deprotonation of solvated formic acid was investigated theoretically with ab initio simulations. With the Car-Parrinello method, deprotonation and reprotonation by means of a proton wire were observed. The microscopics of these reactions were analyzed, and reveal the key role played by nearby water molecules in catalyzing the reactions. A constrained molecular dynamics calculation was carried out to estimate the dissociation free energy. Deprotonation of formic acid was further investigated with the recently developed metadynamics method using the formic acid oxygen coordination numbers as the collective variables. The determined free-energy landscape gives barriers similar to that obtained with the constrained free-energy calculation.
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