Nucleation processes are at the heart of a large number of phenomena, from cloud formation to protein crystallization. A recently emerging area where nucleation is highly relevant is the initiation of filamentous protein self-assembly, a process that has broad implications in many research areas ranging from medicine to nanotechnology. As such, spontaneous nucleation of protein fibrils has received much attention in recent years with many theoretical and experimental studies focussing on the underlying physical principles. In this paper we make a step forward in this direction and explore the early time behaviour of filamentous protein growth in the context of nucleation theory. We first provide an overview of the thermodynamics and kinetics of spontaneous nucleation of protein filaments in the presence of one relevant degree of freedom, namely the cluster size.In this case, we review how key kinetic observables, such as the reaction order of spontaneous nucleation, are directly related to the physical size of the critical nucleus. We then focus on the increasingly prominent case of filament nucleation that includes a conformational conversion of the nucleating building-block as an additional slow step in the nucleation process. Using computer simulations, we study the concentration dependence of the nucleation rate. We find that, under these circumstances, the reaction order of spontaneous nucleation with respect to the free monomer does no longer relate to the overall physical size of the nucleating aggregate but rather to the portion of the aggregate that actively participates in the conformational conversion. Our results thus provide a novel interpretation of the common kinetic descriptors of protein filament formation, including the reaction order of the nucleation step or the scaling exponent of lag times, and put into perspective current theoretical descriptions of protein aggregation.2

Using non-equilibrium molecular dynamics simulations, it has been recently demonstrated that water molecules align in response to an imposed temperature gradient, resulting in an effective electric field. Here, we investigate how thermally induced fields depend on the underlying treatment of long-ranged interactions. For the short-ranged Wolf method and Ewald summation, we find the peak strength of the field to range between 2 × 10 7 and 5 × 10 7 V/m for a temperature gradient of 5.2 K/Å. Our value for the Wolf method is therefore an order of magnitude lower than the literature value [J. Chem. Phys. 139, 014504 (2013) and 143, 036101 (2015)]. We show that this discrepancy can be traced back to the use of an incorrect kernel in the calculation of the electrostatic field. More seriously, we find that the Wolf method fails to predict correct molecular orientations, resulting in dipole densities with opposite sign to those computed using Ewald summation. By considering two different multipole expansions, we show that, for inhomogeneous polarisations, the quadrupole contribution can be significant and even outweigh the dipole contribution to the field. Finally, we propose a more accurate way of calculating the electrostatic potential and the field. In particular, we show that averaging the microscopic field analytically to obtain the macroscopic Maxwell field reduces the error bars by up to an order of magnitude. As a consequence, the simulation times required to reach a given statistical accuracy decrease by up to two orders of magnitude.