A comparison of neutron diffraction and molecular dynamics structures: hydroxyl group and water molecule orientations...

A comparison is presented of experimentally observed hydroxyl and water hydrogen atoms in trypsin determined from neutron density maps with the results of a 140 ps molecular dynamics simulation. Experimental determination of hydrogen and deuterium atom positions in molecules as large as proteins is a unique capability of neutron diffraction. The comparison addresses the degree to which a standard force-field approach can adequately describe the local electrostatic and van der Waals forces that determine the orientations of these hydrogen atoms. The molecular dynamics simulation, based on the all-atom AMBER force-field, allowed free rotation of all hydroxyl groups and movement of water molecules making up a bath surrounding the protein. The neutron densities, derived from 2.1 A 2H2O-H2O difference Fourier maps, provide a database of 27 well-ordered hydroxyl hydrogen atoms. Virtually all of the simulated hydroxyl orientations are within a standard deviation of the experimentally observed positions, including several examples in which both the simulation and the neutron density indicate that a hydroxyl group is shifted from a "standard" rotamer. For the most highly ordered water molecules, the hydrogen distributions calculated from the trajectory were in good agreement with neutron density; simulated water molecules that displayed multiple hydrogen-bonding networks had correspondingly broadened neutron density profiles. This comparison was facilitated by development of a method to construct a pseudo 2 A density map based on the hydrogen atom distributions from the simulation. This method is particularly useful for statically disordered water molecules, in which the average location assigned from a trajectory may represent a site of relatively low occupancy. The degree of disorder of internal water molecules is shown to result primarily from the electrostatic environment surrounding that water molecule as opposed to the cavity size available to the molecule.