Energy landscapes for clusters of hexapeptides

We present the results for energy landscapes of hexapeptides obtained using interfaces to the Large-scale Atomic/Molecular Massively Parallel Simulator (LAMMPS) program. We have used basin-hopping global optimization and discrete path sampling to explore the landscapes of hexapeptide monomers, dimers, and oligomers containing 10, 100, and 200 monomers modeled using a residue-level coarse-grained potential, Mpipi, implemented in LAMMPS. We find that the dimers of peptides containing amino acid residues that are better at promoting phase separation, such as tyrosine and arginine, have melting peaks at higher temperature in their heat capacity compared to phenylalanine and lysine, respectively. This observation correlates with previous work on the same uncapped hexapeptide monomers modeled using atomistic potential. For oligomers, we compare the variation in monomer conformations with radial distance and observe trends for selected angles calculated for each monomer. The LAMMPS interfaces to the GMIN and OPTIM programs for landscape exploration offer new opportunities to investigate larger systems and provide access to the coarse-grained potentials implemented within LAMMPS.