New protein parameters are reported for the all-atom empirical energy function in the CHARMM program. The parameter evaluation was based on a self-consistent approach designed to achieve a balance between the internal (bonding) and interaction (nonbonding) terms of the force field and among the solvent-solvent, solvent-solute, and solute-solute interactions. Optimization of the internal parameters used experimental gas-phase geometries, vibrational spectra, and torsional energy surfaces supplemented with ab initio results. The peptide backbone bonding parameters were optimized with respect to data for N-methylacetamide and the alanine dipeptide. The interaction parameters, particularly the atomic charges, were determined by fitting ab initio interaction energies and geometries of complexes between water and model compounds that represented the backbone and the various side chains. In addition, dipole moments, experimental heats and free energies of vaporization, solvation and sublimation, molecular volumes, and crystal pressures and structures were used in the optimization. The resulting protein parameters were tested by applying them to noncyclic tripeptide crystals, cyclic peptide crystals, and the proteins crambin, bovine pancreatic trypsin inhibitor, and carbonmonoxy myoglobin in vacuo and in crystals. A detailed analysis of the relationship between the alanine dipeptide potential energy surface and calculated protein φ, χ angles was made and used in optimizing the peptide group torsional parameters. The results demonstrate that use of ab initio structural and energetic data by themselves are not sufficient to obtain an adequate backbone representation for peptides and proteins in solution and in crystals. Extensive comparisons between molecular dynamics simulations and experimental data for polypeptides and proteins were performed for both structural and dynamic properties. Energy minimization and dynamics simulations for crystals demonstrate that the latter are needed to obtain meaningful comparisons with experimental crystal structures. The presented parameters, in combination with the previously published CHARMM all-atom parameters for nucleic acids and lipids, provide a consistent set for condensed-phase simulations of a wide variety of molecules of biological interest.

Protein misfolding and aggregation is observed in many amyloidogenic diseases affecting either the central nervous system or a variety of peripheral tissues. Structural and dynamic characterization of all species along the pathways from monomers to fibrils is challenging by experimental and computational means because they involve intrinsically disordered proteins in most diseases. Yet understanding how amyloid species become toxic is the challenge in developing a treatment for these diseases. Here we review what computer, in vitro, in vivo and pharmacological experiments tell us about the accumulation and deposition of the oligomers of the (Aβ, tau), α-synuclein, IAPP and superoxide dismutase 1 proteins, which have been the mainstream concept underlying Alzheimer's disease (AD), Parkinson's disease (PD), type II diabetes (T2D) and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) research, respectively for over many years.While SOD1 is a globular protein with a well-defined 3D structure, the Aβ, tau and α-synuclein proteins belong to the class of intrinsically disordered proteins (IDPs). IDPs are also known to play a critical role in many cellular functions such as signal transduction, cell growth, binding with DNA and RNA, and transcription, and are implicated in the development of cardiovascular problems and cancers 29 . The IDPs involved in neurodegenerative diseases have a few aggregation-prone regions and overall all IDPs have a low mean hydrophobicity and a high mean net charge 30 .IDPs are structurally flexible and lack stable secondary structures in aqueous solution. When isolated, they behave as polymers in a good solvent and their radii of gyration are well described by the Flory scaling law. 31 The insolubility and high self-assembly propensity of IDPs implicated in degenerative diseases have prevented high-resolution structural determination by solution nuclear magnetic resolution (NMR) and X-ray diffraction experiments. Local information at all aggregation steps can be, however, obtained by chemical shifts, residual coupling constants, and J-couplings from NMR, exchange hydrogen/deuterium (H/D) NMR, Raman spectroscopy; and secondary structure from fast Fourier infrared spectroscopy (FTIR) or circular dichroism (CD). Long-range tertiary contacts can be deduced from paramagnetic relaxation enhancement (PRE) NMR spectroscopy and single molecule Förster resonance energy transfer (sm-FRET), and short-range distance contacts can be extracted by cross linked residues determined by mass spectrometry (MS). Low-resolution 3D information of monomers and oligomers can be obtained by ion-mobility mass-spectrometry data (IM/MS) providing cross-collision sections, dynamic light scattering (DLS), pulse field gradient NMR spectroscopy and fluorescence correlation spectroscopy (FCS) providing hydrodynamics radius, small-angle X-ray scattering (SAXS) and small-angle neutron scattering (SANS), atomic force microscopy (AFM) and transmission electron microscopy (TEM) providing height features of the aggregates, as reported by some o...

Nonfibrillar soluble oligomers, which are intermediates in the transition from monomers to amyloid fibrils, may be the toxic species in Alzheimer's disease. To monitor the early events that direct assembly of amyloidogenic peptides we probe the dynamics of formation of (A␤ 16 -22)n by adding a monomer to a preformed (A␤ 16 -22)n؊1 (n ‫؍‬ 4 -6) oligomer in which the peptides are arranged in an antiparallel ␤-sheet conformation. All atom molecular dynamics simulations in water and multiple long trajectories, for a cumulative time of 6.9 s, show that the oligomer grows by a two-stage dock-lock mechanism. The largest conformational change in the added disordered monomer occurs during the rapid (Ϸ50 ns) first dock stage in which the ␤-strand content of the monomer increases substantially from a low initial value. In the second slow-lock phase, the monomer rearranges to form in register antiparallel structures. Surprisingly, the mobile structured oligomers undergo large conformational changes in order to accommodate the added monomer. The time needed to incorporate the monomer into the fluid-like oligomer grows even when n ‫؍‬ 6, which suggests that the critical nucleus size must exceed six. Stable antiparallel structure formation exceeds hundreds of nanoseconds even though frequent interpeptide collisions occur at elevated monomer concentrations used in the simulations. The dock-lock mechanism should be a generic mechanism for growth of oligomers of amyloidogenic peptides.T here is intense interest in determining the structures, kinetics, and growth mechanisms of amyloid fibrils (1-8) because they are associated with a number of diseases such as Alzheimer's (9) and Parkinson's (6) disease as well as prion pathology (10). Recently, significant progress has been made in determining the structures of amyloid fibrils (1,(11)(12)(13). The structures of fibrils of a number of peptides including A␤ 1-40 and A␤ 1-42 that have been proposed using constraints obtained from solid state NMR (13) are also consistent with molecular dynamics simulations (14). In addition, a high resolution crystal structure of peptides extracted from N-terminal segments of Sup35 has been recently reported (15). These studies have confirmed that many peptides, which are unrelated by sequence, adopt the characteristic cross ␤-pattern in the fibril state.It is also important to understand the mechanisms of their formation starting from monomers because it is becoming increasingly clear that the nonfibrillar intermediates may be the toxic species in at least the Alzheimer's disease (9). Experimental characterization of the mechanism of formation of oligomers and their structures is difficult because of their diverse morphologies and rapid conformational fluctuations (16-19). Molecular dynamics (MD) simulations (14,16,20) can not only identify the interactions that drive the oligomer formation, but also can provide a molecular picture of the dynamics of the early events in the route to amyloid fibrils (16).In a previous study, we investigated the factor...

Conspectus The link between oligomers and amyloid fibrils and a variety of neurodegenerative diseases raises the need to decipher the principles governing protein aggregation. Mechanisms of in vivo amyloid formation involve a number of coconspirators and complex interactions with membranes. Nevertheless, it is believed that understanding the biophysical basis of in vitro amyloid formation in well-defined systems is important in discovering ligands that preferentially bind to regions that harbor amyloidogenic tendencies. Determination of structures of fibrils of a variety of peptides has set the stage for probing the dynamics of oligomer formation and amyloid growth using computer simulations. Most experimental and simulation studies have been interpreted largely from the perspective of proteins without much consideration of the role of solvent in enabling or inhibiting oligomer formation and assembly to protofilaments and amyloid fibrils. Here, we provide a perspective on how interactions with water affect folding landscapes of Aβ monomers, oligomer formation in Aβ16–22 fragment, protofilament formation in a peptide from yeast prion Sup35. Explicit molecular dynamics simulations of these systems illustrate how water controls the self-assembly of higher order structures and provide a structural basis for understanding the kinetics of oligomer and fibril growth. Simulations show that monomers of Aβ-peptides sample a number of compact conformations. Population of aggregation-prone structures (N*) with salt-bridge, which bear a striking similarity to the peptide structure in the fibril, requires overcoming a high desolvation barrier. In general, sequences for which N* structures are not significantly populated are unlikely to aggregate. Generically oligomers and fibrils form in two steps. In the first stage water is expelled from the region between peptides rich in hydrophobic residues (for example Aβ16–22) resulting in the disordered oligomers. In the second stage, the peptides align along a preferred axis to form ordered structures with anti-parallel β-strand arrangement. The rate limiting step in the ordered assembly is the rearrangement of the peptides within a confining volume. The mechanism of protofilament formation in a polar peptide fragment from the yeast prion in which the two sheets are packed against each other creating a dry interface illustrates that water dramatically slows down self-assembly. As the sheets approach each other two perfectly ordered one-dimensional water wires, which are stabilized by hydrogen bonds to the amide groups of the polar side chains, results in the formation of long-lived metastable structures. Release of the trapped water from the pore creates a helically-twisted protofilament with a dry interface. Similarly, the driving force for addition of a solvated monomer to a preformed fibril is the release of water whose entropy gain and favorable inter peptide hydrogen bond formation compensates for loss in entropy of the peptides. We suggest that the two-step mechanism, a model a...