The drug discovery process has been deeply transformed recently by the use of computational ligand-based or structure-based methods, helping the lead compounds identification and optimization, and finally the delivery of new drug candidates more quickly and at lower cost. Structure-based computational methods for drug discovery mainly involve ligand-protein docking and rapid binding free energy estimation, both of which require force field parameterization for many drug candidates. Here, we present a fast force field generation tool, called SwissParam, able to generate, for arbitrary small organic molecule, topologies, and parameters based on the Merck molecular force field, but in a functional form that is compatible with the CHARMM force field. Output files can be used with CHARMM or GROMACS. The topologies and parameters generated by SwissParam are used by the docking software EADock2 and EADock DSS to describe the small molecules to be docked, whereas the protein is described by the CHARMM force field, and allow them to reach success rates ranging from 56 to 78%. We have also developed a rapid binding free energy estimation approach, using SwissParam for ligands and CHARMM22/27 for proteins, which requires only a short minimization to reproduce the experimental binding free energy of 214 ligand-protein complexes involving 62 different proteins, with a standard error of 2.0 kcal mol(-1), and a correlation coefficient of 0.74. Together, these results demonstrate the relevance of using SwissParam topologies and parameters to describe small organic molecules in computer-aided drug design applications, together with a CHARMM22/27 description of the target protein. SwissParam is available free of charge for academic users at www.swissparam.ch.

CHARMM27 is a widespread and popular force field for biomolecular simulation, and several recent algorithms such as implicit solvent models have been developed specifically for it. We have here implemented the CHARMM force field and all necessary extended functional forms in the GROMACS molecular simulation package, to make CHARMM-specific features available and to test them in combination with techniques for extended time steps, to make all major force fields available for comparison studies in GROMACS, and to test various solvent model optimizations, in particular the effect of Lennard-Jones interactions on hydrogens. The implementation has full support both for CHARMM-specific features such as multiple potentials over the same dihedral angle and the grid-based energy correction map on the ϕ, ψ protein backbone dihedrals, as well as all GROMACS features such as virtual hydrogen interaction sites that enable 5 fs time steps. The medium-to-long time effects of both the correction maps and virtual sites have been tested by performing a series of 100 ns simulations using different models for water representation, including comparisons between CHARMM and traditional TIP3P. Including the correction maps improves sampling of near native-state conformations in our systems, and to some extent it is even able to refine distorted protein conformations. Finally, we show that this accuracy is largely maintained with a new implicit solvent implementation that works with virtual interaction sites, which enables performance in excess of 250 ns/day for a 900-atom protein on a quad-core desktop computer.

Glutamate transporters terminate neurotransmission by clearing synaptically released glutamate from the extracellular space, allowing repeated rounds of signaling and preventing glutamate-mediated excitotoxicity. Crystallographic studies on an archaeal homologue, GltPh, showed that distinct transport domains translocate substrates into the cytoplasm by moving across the membrane within a central trimerization scaffold. Here, we report direct observations of these 'elevator-like' transport domain motions in the context of reconstituted proteoliposomes and physiological ion gradients using single-molecule fluorescence resonance energy transfer (smFRET) imaging. We show that GltPh bearing two “humanizing” mutations exhibits markedly increased transport domain dynamics, which parallels an increased rate of substrate transport, thereby establishing a direct temporal relationship between transport domain motions and substrate uptake. Crystallographic and computational investigations reveal that these mutations favor structurally “unlocked” states with increased solvent occupancy at the interface between the transport domain and the trimeric scaffold.