Modeling Dimerizations of Transmembrane Proteins using Brownian Dynamics Simulations
Abstract:
The dimerizations of membrane proteins, Outer Membrane Phospholipase A (OMPLA)
and glycophorin A (GPA), have been simulated by an adapted Brownian Dynamics
program. To mimic the membrane protein environment, we introduced a hybrid
electrostatic potential map of membrane-water for electrostatic interaction
calculations.
We added a van der Waals potential term to the force field of the
current version of the BD program to simulate the short-range interactions
of the two monomers.
We reduced the BD sampling space from three dimensions to two dimensions
to improve the efficiency of BD simulations for membrane proteins.
The OMPLA and GPA dimers predicted by our 2D-BD simulation and
structural refinement is in good agreement with the experimental structures.
The adapted 2D-BD method could be used for prediction of dimerization
of other membrane proteins, such as, G protein-coupled receptors,
to help better understanding of the structures and functions of
membrane proteins.