Link to publicationCitation for published version (APA): Sun, D., Forsman, J., Lund, M., & Woodward, C. E. (2014). Effect of arginine-rich cell penetrating peptides on membrane pore formation and life-times: a molecular simulation study. Physical Chemistry Chemical Physics, 16(38), 20785-20795. https://doi.org/10.1039/c4cp02211d General rights Copyright and moral rights for the publications made accessible in the public portal are retained by the authors and/or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights.• Users may download and print one copy of any publication from the public portal for the purpose of private study or research.• You may not further distribute the material or use it for any profit-making activity or commercial gain • You may freely distribute the URL identifying the publication in the public portal Take down policy If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact us providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. 2 AbstractThe molecular basis for the effectiveness of arginine-rich cell penetrating peptides (ARCPPs) traversing cell membrane barrier is not well established. The fact that a threshold concentration of ARCPPs is required for efficient translocation in model membranes suggests cooperative action by ARCPPs. We used umbrella sampling simulations to calculate the free energies for membrane pore formation. The membrane-bound octaarginine (ARG8) peptides showed little cooperativity in lowering the free energy barrier to generate membrane pores by direct peptide translocation or by lipid flip-flop. Instead, high concentrations of ARG8 peptides were found to expand the surface area of the lipid bilayer due to the deep partitioning of guanidinium ions into the lipid glycerol regions. Surface-bound ARG8 peptides can also insert the arginine side chain into one existing transient membrane pore, and the lifetime of the transient membrane pore is significantly extended by arginine. This suggests a cooperative kinetic mechanism may act above a threshold adsorption concentration to facilitate the rapid uptake of these peptides.3

Voltage-gated sodium channels are essential for carrying electrical signals throughout the body, and mutations in these proteins are responsible for a variety of disorders, including epilepsy and pain syndromes. As such, they are the target of a number of drugs used for reducing pain or combatting arrhythmias and seizures. However, these drugs affect all sodium channel subtypes found in the body. Designing compounds to target select sodium channel subtypes will provide a new therapeutic pathway and would maximize treatment efficacy while minimizing side effects. Here, we examine the binding preferences of nine compounds known to be sodium channel pore blockers in molecular dynamics simulations. We use the approach of replica exchange solute tempering (REST) to gain a more complete understanding of the inhibitors' behavior inside the pore of NavMs, a bacterial sodium channel, and NavPas, a eukaryotic sodium channel. Using these simulations, we are able to show that both charged and neutral compounds partition into the bilayer, but neutral forms more readily cross it. We show that there are two possible binding sites for the compounds: () a site on helix 6, which has been previously determined by many experimental and computational studies, and () an additional site, occupied by protonated compounds in which the positively charged part of the drug is attracted into the selectivity filter. Distinguishing distinct binding poses for neutral and charged compounds is essential for understanding the nature of pore block and will aid the design of subtype-selective sodium channel inhibitors.

Abundant peptides and proteins containing arginine (Arg) and lysine (Lys) amino acids can apparently permeate cell membranes with ease. However, the mechanisms by which these peptides and proteins succeed in traversing the free energy barrier imposed by cell membranes remain largely unestablished. Precise thermodynamic studies (both theoretical and experimental) on the interactions of Arg and Lys residues with model lipid bilayers can provide valuable clues to the efficacy of these cationic peptides and proteins. We have carried out molecular dynamics simulations to calculate the interactions of ionized Arg and Lys side-chains with the zwitterionic 1,2-dipalmitoyl-sn-glycero-3-phosphocholine (DPPC) lipid bilayer for 10 widely used lipid/protein force fields: CHARMM36/CHARMM36, SLIPID/AMBER99SB-ILDN, OPLS-AA/OPLS-AA, Berger/OPLS-AA, Berger/GROMOS87, Berger/GROMOS53A6, GROMOS53A6/GROMOS53A6, nonpolarizable MARTINI, polarizable MARTINI, and BMW MARTINI. We performed umbrella sampling simulations to obtain the potential of mean force for Arg and Lys side-chains partitioning from water to the bilayer interior. We found significant differences between the force fields, both for the interactions between side-chains and bilayer surface, as well as the free energy cost for placing the side-chain at the center of the bilayer. These simulation results were compared with the Wimley-White interfacial scale. We also calculated the free energy cost for transferring ionized Arg and Lys side-chains from water to both dry and wet octanol. Our simulations reveal rapid diffusion of water molecules into octanol whereby the equilibrium mole fraction of water in the wet octanol phase was ∼25%. Surprisingly, our free energy calculations found that the high water content in wet octanol lowered the water-to-octanol partitioning free energies for cationic residues by only 0.6 to 0.7 kcal/mol.

Induction of membrane pores has been suggested as the common molecular action by which a variety of amphipathic membrane-active peptides cause damage to cells. In this study, we have performed coarse-grained molecular dynamics simulations to establish two clear molecular processes that seem critical for the activity of amphipathic peptides. They are (i) the recognition and (ii) the stabilization of ruptured membrane pores. By considering 12 structurally different peptide types, we reveal that peptide secondary structure content, hydrophobicity, and length are important physicochemical factors that allow amphipathic peptides to aggregate in and stabilize ruptured membrane pores. The simulated inner diameters of peptide-stabilized membrane pores are in good agreement with available experimental data. However, the orientations of α-helical peptides in the membrane pore were found to be quite dispersed. This supports recent challenges to the traditional depictions to peptide orientations in the classical toroidal and barrel-stave pore models.

The prototypical antimicrobial peptide, melittin is well known for its ability to induce pores in zwitterionic model lipid membranes. However, the mechanism by which melittin accomplishes this is not fully understood. We have conducted all-atom and coarse-grained molecular dynamics simulations which suggest that melittin employs a highly cooperative mechanism for the induction of both small and large membrane pores. The process by which this peptide induces membrane pores appears to be driven by its affinity to membrane defects via its N-terminus region.In our simulations, a membrane defect was deliberately created through either lipid flip-flop or the reorientation of one adsorbed melittin peptide. In a cooperative response, other melittin molecules also inserted their N-termini into the created defect thus lowering the overall free energy. The insertion of these peptide molecules ultimately allowed the defect to develop into a small transmembrane pore, with an estimated diameter of ~1.5 nm and a lifetime of the order of tens of milliseconds. In the presence of a finite membrane tension, we show that this small pore can act as a nucleation site for the stochastic rupture of the lipid bilayer, so as to create a much larger pore. We found that a threshold membrane tension of 25 mN/m was needed to create a ruptured pore.Furthermore, by actively accumulating at its edge, adsorbed peptides are able to cooperatively stabilize this larger pore. The defect mediated pore formation mechanism revealed in this work may also apply to other amphipathic membrane-active peptides.

Accurately predicting small molecule partitioning and hydrophobicity is critical in the drug discovery process. There are many heterogeneous chemical environments within a cell and entire human body. For example, drugs must be able to cross the hydrophobic cellular membrane to reach their intracellular targets, and hydrophobicity is an important driving force for drug−protein binding. Atomistic molecular dynamics (MD) simulations are routinely used to calculate free energies of small molecules binding to proteins, crossing lipid membranes, and solvation but are computationally expensive. Machine learning (ML) and empirical methods are also used throughout drug discovery but rely on experimental data, limiting the domain of applicability. We present atomistic MD simulations calculating 15,000 small molecule free energies of transfer from water to cyclohexane. This large data set is used to train ML models that predict the free energies of transfer. We show that a spatial graph neural network model achieves the highest accuracy, followed closely by a 3D-convolutional neural network, and shallow learning based on the chemical fingerprint is significantly less accurate. A mean absolute error of ∼4 kJ/mol compared to the MD calculations was achieved for our best ML model. We also show that including data from the MD simulation improves the predictions, tests the transferability of each model to a diverse set of molecules, and show multitask learning improves the predictions. This work provides insight into the hydrophobicity of small molecules and ML cheminformatics modeling, and our data set will be useful for designing and testing future ML cheminformatics methods.

Arginine-rich cell penetrating peptides (ARCPPs) are known to quickly permeate cell membranes through a non-endocytotic pathway. Potential clinical applications of this facility have prompted enormous effort, both experimental and theoretical, to better understand how ARCPPs manage to overcome the prodigious thermodynamic cost of lipid bilayer permeation by these highly charged peptides. In this work we report the results of all-atom simulations, which suggest that a kinetic (rather than thermodynamic) mechanism may explain how ARCPPs are able to achieve this. Our simulations reveal that octaarginine significantly hinders the closing of membrane pores, either individually or via aggregation in the membrane pore, while octalysine (not an ARCPP) lacks this ability. Our proposed mechanism is an alternative to current attempts to explain pore-mediated translocation of ARCPPs. It asserts that ARCPPs need not lower the equilibrium thermodynamic cost of pore formation. Instead, they can achieve rapid bilayer translocation by instead slowing down the kinetics of naturally occurring thermal pores.

We systematically investigated the self-assembly behavior of poly­(1,2-butadiene)-b-poly­(ethylene oxide) (PB-b-PEO) block copolymer in [Bmim]­[PF6] ionic liquid (IL) via dissipative particle dynamics simulations. An expanding scope of nanostructures, such as spherical micelles, rodlike micelles, entangled cylinders, sheets, branched lamellae, lamellae, platelets, tubes, and IL microphase structures, was observed under different polymer concentrations and polymer block ratios. When the polymer concentration was lower than 30 vol %, self-assembled morphologies transformed from spherical to rodlike or sheetlike micelles as the fraction of PEO block decreased. When the copolymer concentration was higher than 30 vol %, new morphologies such as wormlike micelles and branched lamellae emerged. Platelet and tube nanostructures were obtained when the concentration of PEO was lower than 10 vol %. In addition, lamellae structure was observed, represented as a triangular area in the phase diagram, and the IL microphase nanostructure appeared in the bottom right of the phase diagram. These various nanostructures observed in our study suggest a universal mechanism for the self-assembly of amphiphiles in given solvents.