FSATOOL: A useful tool to do the conformational sampling and trajectory analysis work for biomolecules

Reliable conformational sampling and trajectory analysis are always important to the study of the folding or binding mechanisms of biomolecules. Generally, one has to prepare many complicated parameters and follow a lot of steps to obtain the final data. The whole process is too complicated to new users. In this article, we provide a convenient and user-friendly tool that is compatible to AMBER, called fast sampling and analysis tool (FSATOOL). FSATOOL has some useful features. First and the most important, the whole work is extremely simplified into two steps, one is the fast sampling procedure and the other is the trajectory analysis procedure. Second, it contains several powerful sampling methods for the simulation on graphics process unit, including our previous mixing replica exchange molecular dynamics method. The method combines the advantages of the biased and unbiased simulations. Finally, it extracts the dominant transition pathways automatically from the folding network by Markov state model. Users do not need to do the tedious intermediate steps by hand. To illustrate the usage of FSATOOL in practice, we perform one simulation for a RNA hairpin in explicit solvent. All the results are presented. © 2019 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.