Filtering molecular dynamics trajectories to reveal low-frequency collective motions: phospholipase A2

A novel method for analysing molecular dynamics trajectories has been developed, which filters out high frequencies using digital signal processing techniques and facilitates focusing on the low-frequency collective motions of proteins. These motions involve low energy slow motions, which lead to important biological phenomena such as domain closure and allosteric effects in enzymes. The filtering method treats each of the atomic trajectories obtained from the molecular dynamics simulation as a "signal". The trajectories of each of the atoms in the system (or any subset of interest) are Fourier transformed to the frequency domain, a filtering function is applied and then an inverse transformation back to the time domain yields the filtered trajectory. The filtering method has been used to study the dynamics of the enzyme phospholipase A2. In the filtered trajectory, all the high frequency bond and valence angle vibrations were eliminated, leaving only low-frequency motion, mainly fluctuations in torsions and conformational transitions. Analysis of this trajectory revealed interesting motions of the protein, including concerted movements of helices, and changes in shape of the active site cavity. Unlike normal mode analysis, which has been used to study the motion of proteins, this method does not require converged minimizations or diagonalization of a matrix of second derivatives. In addition, anharmonicity, multiple minima and conformational transitions are treated explicitly. Thus, the filtering method avoids most of the approximations implicit in other investigations of the dynamic behaviour of large systems.