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The most popular and universally predictive protein simulation models employ all-atom molecular dynamics (MD), but they come at extreme computational cost. The development of a universal, computationally efficient coarse-grained (CG) model with similar prediction performance has been a long-standing challenge. By combining recent deep learning methods with a large and diverse training set of all-atom protein simulations, we here develop a bottom-up CG force field with chemical transferability, which can be used for extrapolative molecular dynamics on new sequences not used during model parametrization. We demonstrate that the model successfully predicts folded structures, intermediates, metastable folded and unfolded basins, and the fluctuations of intrinsically disordered proteins while it is several orders of magnitude faster than an all-atom model. This showcases the feasibility of a universal and computationally efficient machine-learned CG model for proteins.

Machine-learned coarse-grained (CG) models have the potential for simulating large molecular complexes beyond what is possible with atomistic molecular dynamics. However, training accurate CG models remains a challenge. A widely used methodology for learning CG force-fields maps forces from all-atom molecular dynamics to the CG representation and matches them with a CG force-field on average. We show that there is flexibility in how to map all-atom forces to the CG representation, and that the most commonly used mapping methods are statistically inefficient and potentially even incorrect in the presence of constraints in the all-atom simulation. We define an optimization statement for force mappings and demonstrate that substantially improved CG force-fields can be learned from the same simulation data when using optimized force maps. The method is demonstrated on the miniproteins Chignolin and Tryptophan Cage and published as open-source code., Comment: 44 pages, 19 figures

A generalized understanding of protein dynamics is an unsolved scientific problem, the solution of which is critical to the interpretation of the structure-function relationships that govern essential biological processes. Here, we approach this problem by constructing coarse-grained molecular potentials based on artificial neural networks and grounded in statistical mechanics. For training, we build a unique dataset of unbiased all-atom molecular dynamics simulations of approximately 9 ms for twelve different proteins with multiple secondary structure arrangements. The coarse-grained models are capable of accelerating the dynamics by more than three orders of magnitude while preserving the thermodynamics of the systems. Coarse-grained simulations identify relevant structural states in the ensemble with comparable energetics to the all-atom systems. Furthermore, we show that a single coarse-grained potential can integrate all twelve proteins and can capture experimental structural features of mutated proteins. These results indicate that machine learning coarse-grained potentials could provide a feasible approach to simulate and understand protein dynamics.

Coarse-graining offers a means to extend the achievable time and length scales of molecular dynamics simulations beyond what is practically possible in the atomistic regime. Sampling molecular configurations of interest can be done efficiently using coarse-grained simulations, from which meaningful physicochemical information can be inferred if the corresponding all-atom configurations are reconstructed. However, this procedure of backmapping to reintroduce the lost atomistic detail into coarse-grain structures has proven a challenging task due to the many feasible atomistic configurations that can be associated with one coarse-grain structure. Existing backmapping methods are strictly frame-based, relying on either heuristics to replace coarse-grain particles with atomic fragments and subsequent relaxation, or parameterized models to propose atomic coordinates separately and independently for each coarse-grain structure. These approaches neglect information from previous trajectory frames that is critical to ensuring temporal coherence of the backmapped trajectory, while also offering information potentially helpful to produce higher-fidelity atomic reconstructions. In this work we present a deep learning-enabled data-driven approach for temporally coherent backmapping that explicitly incorporates information from preceding trajectory structures. Our method trains a conditional variational autoencoder to non-deterministically reconstruct atomistic detail conditioned on both the target coarse-grain configuration and the previously reconstructed atomistic configuration. We demonstrate our backmapping approach on two exemplar biomolecular systems: alanine dipeptide and the miniprotein chignolin. We show that our backmapped trajectories accurately recover the structural, thermodynamic, and kinetic properties of the atomistic trajectory data.

Accurate modeling of the solvent environment for biological molecules is crucial for computational biology and drug design. A popular approach to achieve long simulation time scales for large system sizes is to incorporate the effect of the solvent in a mean-field fashion with implicit solvent models. However, a challenge with existing implicit solvent models is that they often lack accuracy or certain physical properties compared to explicit solvent models, as the many-body effects of the neglected solvent molecules is difficult to model as a mean field. Here, we leverage machine learning (ML) and multi-scale coarse graining (CG) in order to learn implicit solvent models that can approximate the energetic and thermodynamic properties of a given explicit solvent model with arbitrary accuracy, given enough training data. Following the previous ML--CG models CGnet and CGSchnet, we introduce ISSNet, a graph neural network, to model the implicit solvent potential of mean force. ISSNet can learn from explicit solvent simulation data and be readily applied to MD simulations. We compare the solute conformational distributions under different solvation treatments for two peptide systems. The results indicate that ISSNet models can outperform widely-used generalized Born and surface area models in reproducing the thermodynamics of small protein systems with respect to explicit solvent. The success of this novel method demonstrates the potential benefit of applying machine learning methods in accurate modeling of solvent effects for in silico research and biomedical applications., Comment: 16 pages, 6 figures

Coarse graining enables the investigation of molecular dynamics for larger systems and at longer timescales than is possible at atomic resolution. However, a coarse graining model must be formulated such that the conclusions we draw from it are consistent with the conclusions we would draw from a model at a finer level of detail. It has been proven that a force matching scheme defines a thermodynamically consistent coarse-grained model for an atomistic system in the variational limit. Wang et al. [ACS Cent. Sci. 5, 755 (2019)] demonstrated that the existence of such a variational limit enables the use of a supervised machine learning framework to generate a coarse-grained force field, which can then be used for simulation in the coarse-grained space. Their framework, however, requires the manual input of molecular features upon which to machine learn the force field. In the present contribution, we build upon the advance of Wang et al.and introduce a hybrid architecture for the machine learning of coarse-grained force fields that learns their own features via a subnetwork that leverages continuous filter convolutions on a graph neural network architecture. We demonstrate that this framework succeeds at reproducing the thermodynamics for small biomolecular systems. Since the learned molecular representations are inherently transferable, the architecture presented here sets the stage for the development of machine-learned, coarse-grained force fields that are transferable across molecular systems., Comment: 17 pages, 9 figures

Atomistic or ab-initio molecular dynamics simulations are widely used to predict thermodynamics and kinetics and relate them to molecular structure. A common approach to go beyond the time- and length-scales accessible with such computationally expensive simulations is the definition of coarse-grained molecular models. Existing coarse-graining approaches define an effective interaction potential to match defined properties of high-resolution models or experimental data. In this paper, we reformulate coarse-graining as a supervised machine learning problem. We use statistical learning theory to decompose the coarse-graining error and cross-validation to select and compare the performance of different models. We introduce CGnets, a deep learning approach, that learns coarse-grained free energy functions and can be trained by a force matching scheme. CGnets maintain all physically relevant invariances and allow one to incorporate prior physics knowledge to avoid sampling of unphysical structures. We show that CGnets can capture all-atom explicit-solvent free energy surfaces with models using only a few coarse-grained beads and no solvent, while classical coarse-graining methods fail to capture crucial features of the free energy surface. Thus, CGnets are able to capture multi-body terms that emerge from the dimensionality reduction.