Abstract
Molecular dynamics or MD simulation is gradually maturing into a tool for constructing in vivo models of living cells in atomistic details. The feasibility of such models is bolstered by integrating the simulations with data from microscopic, tomographic and spectroscopic experiments on exascale supercomputers, facilitated by the use of deep learning technologies. Over time, MD simulation has evolved from tens of thousands of atoms to over 100 million atoms comprising an entire cell organelle, a photosynthetic chromatophore vesicle from a purple bacterium. In this chapter, we present a step-by-step outline for preparing, executing and analyzing such large-scale MD simulations of biological systems that are essential to life processes. All scripts are provided via GitHub.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Title of host publication | Methods in Molecular Biology |
| Publisher | Humana Press Inc. |
| Pages | 335-356 |
| Number of pages | 22 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - 2021 |
Publication series
| Name | Methods in Molecular Biology |
|---|---|
| Volume | 2302 |
| ISSN (Print) | 1064-3745 |
| ISSN (Electronic) | 1940-6029 |
Funding
The authors acknowledge start-up funds from the School of Molecular Sciences and Center for Applied Structure Discovery at Arizona State University, and the resources of the OLCF at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, which is supported by the Office of Science at DOE under Contract No. DEAC05-00OR22725, made available via the INCITE program. We also acknowledge NAMD and VMD developments supported by NIH (P41GM104601) and R01GM098243-02 for supporting our study of membrane proteins.
Keywords
- Ensemble toolkit
- High-performance computing
- Molecular dynamics
- Multiscale simulation
- NAMD
- Photosynthetic chromatophore
- VMD