A detailed
understanding of temperature and pressure effects on
an infinitely dilute protein’s conformational equilibrium requires
knowledge of the corresponding infinitely dilute partial molar properties.
Established molecular dynamics methodologies generally have not provided
a way to calculate these properties without either a loss of thermodynamic
rigor, the introduction of nonunique parameters, or a loss of information
about which solute conformations specifically contributed to the output
values. Here we implement a simple method that is thermodynamically
rigorous and possesses none of the above disadvantages, and we report
on the method’s feasibility and computational demands. We calculate
infinitely dilute partial molar properties for two proteins and attempt
to distinguish the thermodynamic differences between a native and
a denatured conformation of a designed miniprotein. We conclude that
simple ensemble average properties can be calculated with very reasonable
amounts of computational power. In contrast, properties corresponding
to fluctuating quantities are computationally demanding to calculate
precisely, although they can be obtained more easily by following
the temperature and/or pressure dependence of the corresponding ensemble
averages.