CafeMol: A Coarse-Grained Biomolecular Simulator for Simulating Proteins at Work

H Kenzaki and N Koga and N Hori and R Kanada and WF Li and K Okazaki and XQ Yao and S Takada, JOURNAL OF CHEMICAL THEORY AND COMPUTATION, 7, 1979-1989 (2011).

DOI: 10.1021/ct2001045

For simulating proteins at work in millisecond time scale or longer, we develop a coarse-grained (CG) molecular dynamics (MD) method and software, CafeMol. At the resolution of one-particle-per-residue, CafeMol equips four structure-based protein models: ( I) the off-lattice Go model, (2) the atomic interaction based CG model for native state and folding dynamics, (3) the multiple-basin model for conformational change dynamics, and (4) the elastic network model for quasiharmonic fluctuations around the native structure. Ligands can be treated either explicitly or implicitly. For mimicking functional motions of proteins driven by some external force, CafeMol has various and flexible means to "switch" the energy functions that induce active motions of the proteins. CafeMol can do parallel computation with modest sized PC clusters. We describe CafeMol methods and illustrate it with several examples, such as rotary motions of F-1-ATPase and drug exports from a transporter. The CafeMol source code is available at www.cafemol.org.

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