A New Transfer Free Energy Based Implicit Solvation Model for the Description of Disordered and Folded Proteins

Most biological events occur on time scales that are difficult to access using conventional all-atom molecular dynamics simulations in explicit solvent. Implicit solvent techniques offer a promising solution to this problem, alleviating the computational cost associated with the simulation of large systems and accelerating the sampling compared to explicit solvent models. The substitution of water molecules by a mean field, however, introduces simplifications that may penalize accuracy and impede the prediction of certain physical properties. We demonstrate that existing implicit solvent models developed using a transfer free energy approach, while satisfactory at reproducing the folding behavior of globular proteins, fare less well in characterizing the conformational properties of intrinsically disordered proteins. We develop a new implicit solvent model that maximizes the degree of accuracy for both disordered and folded proteins. We show, by comparing the simulation outputs to experimental data, that in combination with the a99SB-disp force field, the implicit solvent model can describe both disordered (aβ40, PaaA2, and drkN SH3) and folded ((AAQAA)₃, CLN025, Trp-cage, and GTT) peptides. Our implicit solvent model permits a computationally efficient investigation of proteins containing both ordered and disordered regions, as well as the study of the transition between ordered and disordered protein states.