Hamiltonian Reweighing To Refine Protein Backbone Dihedral Angle Parameters in the GROMOS Force Field

Molecular dynamics simulations of proteins depend critically on the underlying force field, which may be parameterized against experimental data or high-quality quantum calculations. Here, we develop search algorithms based on Monte Carlo and steepest descent calculations to optimize the backbone dihedral angle parameters from a single reference simulation. We apply these tools to improve the agreement between simulations of single, capped amino acids and experimentally determined J values and secondary structure propensities of these molecules. The parameters are further refined based on simulations of a set of seven proteins and finally validated in simulations on a large set of 52 protein structures. Improvements in the dihedral angle distributions are observed, and structural propensities of the proteins are reproduced very well. Overall, the GROMOS 54A8_bb parameter set forms an improvement to previous parameter sets, both for small molecules and for protein simulations.