Water structure has an essential role in biological assembly. Hydrophobic dewetting has been documented as a general mechanism for the assembly of hydrophobic surfaces; however, the association mechanism of hydrophilic interfaces remains mysterious and cannot be explained by simple continuum water models that ignore the solvent structure. Here we study the association of two hydrophilic proteins using unbiased extensive molecular dynamics simulations that reproducibly recovered the native bound complex. The water in the interfacial gap forms an adhesive hydrogen-bond network between the interfaces stabilizing early intermediates before native contacts are formed. Furthermore, the interfacial gap solvent showed a reduced dielectric shielding up to distances of few nanometres during the diffusive phase. The interfacial gap solvent generates an anisotropic dielectric shielding with a strongly preferred directionality for the electrostatic interactions along the association direction.

In the Ermak-McCammon algorithm for Brownian Dynamics, the hydrodynamic interactions (HI) between N spherical particles are described by a 3N ×3N diffusion tensor. This tensor has to be factorized at each timestep with a runtime of O(N 3 ), making the calculation of the correlated random displacements the bottleneck for many-particle simulations. Here we present a faster algorithm for this step, which is based on a truncated expansion of the hydrodynamic multi-particle correlations as two-body contributions. The comparison to the exact algorithm and to the Chebyshev approximation of Fixman verifies that for bead-spring polymers this approximation yields about 95% of the hydrodynamic correlations at an improved runtime scaling of O(N 2 ) and a reduced memory footprint. The approximation is independent of the actual form of the hydrodynamic tensor and can be applied to arbitrary particle configurations. This now allows to include HI into large manyparticle Brownian dynamics simulations, where until now the runtime scaling of the correlated random motion was prohibitive.

We present a molecular model of a chromatophore vesicle from Rhodobacter sphaeroides. These vesicles are ideal benchmark systems for molecular and systemic simulations, because they have been well studied, they are small, and they are naturally separated from their cellular environment. To set up a photosynthetic chain working under steady-state conditions, we compiled from the experimental literature the specific activities and geometries that have been determined for their constituents. This data then allowed defining the stoichiometries for all membrane proteins. This article contains the kinetic part of the reconstructed model, while the spatial reconstruction is presented in a companion article. By considering the transport properties of the Cytochrome c(2) and ubiquinone pools, we show that their size and oxidation states allow for an efficient buffering of the statistical fluctuations that arise from the small size of the vesicles. Stoichiometric and kinetic considerations indicate that a typical chromatophore vesicle of Rb. sphaeroides with a diameter of 45 nm should contain approximately five bc(1) monomers.

Crystalline and amorphous materials composed of the same atoms exhibit strikingly different properties. Likewise, the behavior of materials composed of mesoscale particles depends on the arrangement of their constituent particles. Here, we demonstrate control over particle arrangement during agglomeration. We obtain disordered and ordered agglomerates of the same alkyl thiol-coated gold nanoparticles depending on temperature and solvent. We find that ordered agglomeration occurs exclusively above the melting temperature of the ligand shells. Many-particle simulations show that the contact mechanics of the ligand shells dominate the order-disorder transition: Purely spherical particle-particle interactions yield order, whereas localized "stiction" between the ligand shells leads to disorder. This indicates that the "stickiness" and the packing of the agglomerates can be switched by the state of the ligand shells. It suggests that contact mechanics govern ordering in a wide range of nanoparticles.

Simulations were performed for up to 150 simplified spherical horse heart cytochrome c molecules in the presence of a charged surface, which serves as an approximate model for a lipid membrane. Screened electrostatic and short-ranged attractive as well as repulsive van der Waals forces for interparticle and particle-membrane interactions are utilized in the simulations. At a distance from the membrane, where particle-membrane interactions are negligible, the simulation is coupled to a noninteraction continuum analogous to a heat bath [Geyer et al., J. Chem. Phys. 120, 4573 (2004)]. From the particles' density profiles perpendicular to the planar surface binding isotherms are derived and compared to experimental results [Heimburg et al. (1999)]. Using a negatively charged structureless membrane surface a saturation effect was found for relatively large particle concentrations. Since biological membranes often contain membrane proteins, we also studied the influence of additional charges on our model membrane mimicking bacterial reaction centers. We find that the onset of the saturation occurs for much lower concentrations and is sensitive to the detailed implementation. Therefore we suggest that local distortion of membrane planarity (undulation), or lipid demixing, or the presence of charged integral membrane proteins create preferential binding sites on the membrane. Only then do we observe saturation at physiological concentrations.