Computational glycoscience: characterizing the spatial and temporal properties of glycans and glycan-protein...

Modern computational methods offer the tools to provide insight into the structural and dynamic properties of carbohydrate-protein complexes, beyond that provided by experimental structural biology. Dynamic properties such as the fluctuation of inter-molecular hydrogen bonds, the residency times of bound water molecules, side chain motions and ligand flexibility may be readily determined computationally. When taken with respect to the unliganded states, these calculations can also provide insight into the entropic and enthalpic changes in free energy associated with glycan binding. In addition, virtual ligand screening may be employed to predict the three dimensional (3D) structures of carbohydrate-protein complexes, given 3D structures for the components. In principle, the 3D structure of the protein may itself be derived by modeling, leading to the exciting--albeit high risk--realm of virtual structure prediction. This latter approach is appealing, given the difficulties associated with generating experimental 3D structures for some classes of glycan binding proteins; however, it is also the least robust. An unexpected outcome of the development of algorithms for modeling carbohydrate-protein interactions has been the discovery of errors in reported experimental 3D structures and a heightened awareness of the need for carbohydrate-specific computational tools for assisting in the refinement and curation of carbohydrate-containing crystal structures. Here we present a summary of the basic strategies associated with employing classical force field based modeling approaches to problems in glycoscience, with a focus on identifying typical pitfalls and limitations. This is not an exhaustive review of the current literature, but hopefully will provide a guide for the glycoscientist interested in modeling carbohydrates and carbohydrate-protein complexes, as well as the computational chemist contemplating such tasks.