SGOOP-d: Estimating Kinetic Distances and Reaction Coordinate Dimensionality for Rare Event Systems from...

Understanding kinetics including reaction pathways and associated transition rates is an important yet difficult problem in numerous chemical and biological systems, especially in situations with multiple competing pathways. When these high-dimensional systems are projected on low-dimensional coordinates, which are often needed for enhanced sampling or for interpretation of simulations and experiments, one can end up losing the kinetic connectivity of the underlying high-dimensional landscape. Thus, in the low-dimensional projection, metastable states might appear closer or further than they actually are. To deal with this issue, in this work, we develop a formalism that learns a multidimensional yet minimally complex reaction coordinate (RC) for generic high-dimensional systems. When projected along this RC, all possible kinetically relevant pathways can be demarcated and the true high-dimensional connectivity is maintained. One of the defining attributes of our method lies in that it can work on long unbiased simulations as well as biased simulations often needed for rare event systems. We demonstrate the utility of the method by studying a range of model systems including conformational transitions in a small peptide Ace-Ala₃-Nme, where we show how two-dimensional and three-dimensional RCs found by our previously published spectral gap optimization method "SGOOP" [Tiwary, P. and Berne, B. J. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. 2016, 113, 2839] can capture the kinetics for 23 and all 28 out of the 28 dominant state-to-state transitions, respectively.