Methods Based on a Microscopic Description of Protein

Constant pH Molecular Dynamics Based on Discrete Protonation States 

In recent years, a class of methods has been developed for molecular dynamics simulations to be performed with an external pH parameter, like temperature or pressure [18, 43, 44, 70], These methods treat the solution as an infinite proton bath, and are thus referred to as constant pH molecular dynamics (PHMD). In PHMD, conformational dynamics of a protein is sampled simultaneously with the protonation states as a function of pH. As a result, protein dielectric response to the 

The discrete protonation states methods employing implicit solvent models in both MD and MC steps have significantly lower computational cost. Dlugosz and 

The discrete protonation states methods have been tested in pKa calculations for several small molecules and peptides, including succinic acid [4, 25], acetic acid [93], a heptapeptide derived from ovomucoid third domain [27], and decalysine [61], However, these methods have sofar been tested on only one protein, the hen egg lysozyme [16, 61, 71], While the method using explicit solvent for both MD and MC sampling did not give quantitative agreement with experiment due to convergence difficulty [16], the results using a GB model [71] and the mixed PB/explicit 

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