A high-throughput computational approach to UV-Vis spectra in protein mutants

In this work we present a high-throughput approach to the computation of absorption UV-Vis spectra tailored to mutagenesis studies. The scheme makes use of a single molecular dynamics trajectory of a reference (non-mutated) species. The shifts in absorption energy caused by a residue mutation are evaluated by building an effective potential of the environment and computing a correction term based on perturbation theory. The sampling is only performed in the phase space of the initial protein. We analyze the robustness of the method by comparing different approximations for the effective potential, the sampling of mutant residue geometries and observing the impact in the prediction of both bathocromic and hypsochromic shifts. As a test subject, we consider a red fluorescent protein variant with potential biotechnological applications.