February 17, 1995
A variational method for computing conformational properties of molecules with Lennard-Jones potentials for the monomer-monomer interactions is presented. The approach is tailored to deal with angular degrees of freedom, {\it rotors}, and consists in the iterative solution of a set of deterministic equations with annealing in temperature. The singular short-distance behaviour of the Lennard-Jones potential is adiabatically switched on in order to obtain stable convergence. As testbeds for the approach two distinct ensembles of molecules are used, characterized by a roughly dense-packed ore a more elongated ground state. For the latter, problems are generated from natural frequencies of occurrence of amino acids and phenomenologically determined potential parameters; they seem to represent less disorder than was previously assumed in synthetic protein studies. For the dense-packed problems in particular, the variational algorithm clearly outperforms a gradient descent method in terms of minimal energies. Although it cannot compete with a careful simulating annealing algorithm, the variational approach requires only a tiny fraction of the computer time. Issues and results when applying the method to polyelectrolytes at a finite temperature are also briefly discussed.
Similar papers 1
December 6, 1993
A variational approach is used to calculate free energy and conformational properties in polyelectrolytes. The true bond and Coulomb potentials are approximated by a trial isotropic harmonic energy containing monomer-monomer force constants as variational parameters. By a judicious choice of representation and the use of incremental matrix inversion, an efficient and fast-convergent iterative algorithm is constructed, that optimizes the free energy. The computational demand s...
April 6, 1998
We present and discuss a novel approach to the direct and inverse protein folding problem. The proposed strategy is based on a variational approach that allows the simultaneous extraction of amino acid interactions and the low-temperature free energy of sequences of amino acids. The knowledge-based technique is simple and straightforward to implement even for realistic off-lattice proteins because it does not entail threading-like procedures. Its validity is assessed in the c...
September 9, 1996
A variational approach, based on a discrete representation of the chain, is used to calculate free energy and conformational properties in polyelectrolytes. The true bond and Coulomb potentials are approximated by a trial isotropic harmonic energy containing force constants between {\em all}monomer-pairs as variational parameters. By a judicious choice of representation and the use of incremental matrix inversion, an efficient and fast-convergent iterative algorithm is constr...
October 1, 1999
We propose and discuss a novel strategy for protein design. The method is based on recent theoretical advancements which showed the importance to treat carefully the conformational free energy of designed sequences. In this work we show how computational cost can be kept to a minimum by encompassing negative design features, i.e. isolating a small number of structures that compete significantly with the target one for being occupied at low temperature. The method is succesful...
February 14, 2020
As one of the most robust global optimization methods, simulated annealing has received considerable attention, with many variations that attempt to improve the cooling schedule. This paper introduces a variant of simulated annealing that is useful for optimizing atomistic structures, and makes use of the statistical mechanical properties of the system, determined on the fly during optimization, to adaptively control the cooling rate. The adaptive cooling approach is demonstr...
July 29, 2003
We apply the conformational space annealing (CSA) method to the Lennard-Jones clusters and find all known lowest energy configurations up to 201 atoms, without using extra information of the problem such as the structures of the known global energy minima. In addition, the robustness of the algorithm with respect to the randomness of initial conditions of the problem is demonstrated by ten successful independent runs up to 183 atoms. Our results indicate that the CSA method i...
September 22, 2003
A new general algorithm for optimization of potential functions for protein folding is introduced. It is based upon gradient optimization of the thermodynamic stability of native folds of a training set of proteins with known structure. The iterative update rule contains two thermodynamic averages which are estimated by (generalized ensemble) Monte Carlo. We test the learning algorithm on a Lennard-Jones (LJ) force field with a torsional angle degrees-of-freedom and a single-...
February 16, 1999
We studied the possibility to approximate a Lennard Jones interaction by a pairwise contact potential. First we used a Lennard-Jones potential to design off-lattice, protein-like heteropolymer sequences, whose lowest energy (native) conformations were then identified by Molecular Dynamics. Then we turned to investigate whether one can find a pairwise contact potential, whose ground states are the contact maps associated with these native conformations. We show that such a req...
May 23, 2014
We introduce a variational approximation to the microscopic dynamics of rare conformational transitions of macromolecules. Within this framework it is possible to simulate on a small computer cluster reactions as complex as protein folding, using state of the art all-atom force fields in explicit solvent. We test this method against molecular dynamics (MD) simulations of the folding of an alpha- and a beta-protein performed with the same all-atom force field on the Anton supe...
December 30, 2010
The Lennard-Jones (LJ) Potential Energy Problem is to construct the most stable form of $N$ atoms of a molecule with the minimal LJ potential energy. This problem has a simple mathematical form $f(x) = 4\sum_{i=1}^N \sum_{j=1,j<i}^N (\frac{1}{\tau_{ij}^6} - \frac{1}{\tau_{ij}^3} {subject to} x\in \mathbb{R}^n$, where $\tau_{ij} = (x_{3i-2} - x_{3j-2})^2 + (x_{3i-1} - x_{3j-1})^2 + (x_{3i} - x_{3j})^2$, $(x_{3i-2},x_{3i-1},x_{3i})$ is the coordinates of atom $i$ in $\mathbb{R}...