Getting started - Peptide

Main Table of Contents

VERSION 4.0
Sun 18 Jan 2009

Contents

Ribonuclease S-peptide

Ribonuclease A is a digestive enzyme, secreted by the pancreas. The enzyme can be cleaved by subtilisin at a single peptide bond to yield Ribonuclease-S, a catalytically active complex of an S-peptide moiety (residues 1-20) and an S-protein moiety (residues 21-124), bound together by multiple non-covalent links (Stryer, 1988).

The S-Peptide has been studied in many ways, experimentally as well as theoretically (simulation) because of the high a-helix content in solution, which is remarkable in such a small peptide.

All the files of speptide are stored in the directory tutor/speptide. First go to this directory:cd speptide

To be able to simulate the S-Peptide we need a starting structure. This can be taken from the protein data bank. There are a number of different structure for Ribonuclease S, from one of which we have cut out the first 20 residues, and stored it in speptide.pdb. Have a look at the file

more speptide.pdb

If you have access to a molecular graphics program such as rasmol, you can look at the molecule on screen, eg:

rasmol speptide.pdb

The following steps have to be taken to perform a simulation of the peptide.

  1. Convert the pdb-file speptide.pdb to a GROMACS structure file and a GROMACS topology file.
  2. Solvate the peptide in water
  3. Perform an energy minimization of the peptide in solvent
  4. Add ions if necessary (we will omit this step here)
  5. Perform a short MD run with position restraints on the peptide
  6. Perform full MD without restraints
  7. Analysis

We will describe in detail how such a simulation can be done, starting from a pdb-file.

Generate a topology file (.top) from the pdb-file (.pdb)

Generate a molecular topology and a structure file in format. This can be done with the pdb2gmx program:

pdb2gmx -f speptide.pdb -p speptide.top -o speptide.gro

Note that the correct file extension are added automatically to the filenames on the command line. You will only be asked to choose a forcefield, choose 0, but you can also have pdb2gmx ask you about protonation of residues, and about protonation of N- and C-terminus. You can type

pdb2gmx -h

to see the available options.

The pdb2gmx program has generated a topology file speptide.top and a GROMACS structure file speptide.gro and it will generate hydrogen positions. The -p and -o options with he filenames are optional; without them the files topol.top and conf.gro will be generated. Now have a look at the output from pdb2gmx,

more speptide.gro

You will see a close resemblance to the pdb file, only the layout of the file is a bit different. Also do have a look at the topology

more speptide.top

You will see a large file containing the atom types, the physical bonds between atoms, etcetera.

Solvate the peptide in a periodic box filled with water

This is done using the programs editconf and genbox. editconf will make a rectangular box with empty space of user specified size around the molecule. genbox will read the structure file and fill the box with water.

editconf -f speptide -o -d 0.5
genbox -cp out -cs -p speptide -o b4em

The program prints some lines of user information, like the volume of the box and the number of water molecules added to your peptide. genbox also changes the topology file speptide.top to include these water molecules in the topology. This can been seen by looking at the bottom of the speptide.top file

tail speptide.top

You will see some lines like 

[ system ]
; Name		Number
Protein		1
SOL		N

where N is the number of water molecules added to your system by genbox.

It is also possible to solvate a peptide in another solvent such as dimethylsulfoxide (DMSO), as has been done by Mierke & Kessler, 1991.

Generate index file (.ndx extension)

By default, most GROMACS programs generate a set of index groups to select the most common subsets of atoms from your system (e.g. Protein, Backbone, C-alpha's, Solute, etc.). For the special cases when you need to select other groups than the default ones, an index file can be generated using make_ndx. This is an interactive program that lets you manipulate molecules, residues and atom. It's use should be self-explanatory. To invoke the program you would

make_ndx -f b4em

but don't bother for now.

Perform an energy minimization of the peptide in solvent

Now we have to perform an energy minimization of the structure to remove the local strain in the peptide (due to generation of hydrogen positions) and to remove bad Van der Waals contacts (particles that are too close). This can be done with the mdrun program which is the MD and EM program. Before we can use the mdrun program however, we have to preprocess the topology file ( speptide.top), the structure file ( speptide.gro) and a special parameter file (em.mdp). Check the contents of this file

more em.mdp

Preprocessing is done with the preprocessor called grompp. This reads up the files just mentioned:

grompp -v -f em -c b4em -o em -p speptide

In this command the -v option turns on verbose mode, which gives a little bit of clarifying info on what the program is doing. We now have made a run input file (em.tpr) which serves as input for the mdrun program. Now we can do the energy minimization:

mdrun -v -s em -o em -c after_em -g emlog

In this command the -v option turns on verbose mode again. The -o option sets the filename for the trajectory file, which is not very important in energy minimizations. The -c option sets the filename of the structure file after energy minimization. This file we will subsequently use as input for the MD run. The energy minimization takes some time, the amount depending on the CPU in your computer, the load of your computer, etc. The mdrun program is automatically niced; it runs at low priority. All programs that do extensive computations are automatically run at low priority. For most modern workstations this computation should be a matter of minutes. The minimization is finished when either the minimization has converged or a fixed number of steps has been performed. Since the system consists merely of water, a quick check on the potential energy should reveal whether the minimization was successful: the potential energy of 1 SPC water molecule at 300 K is -42 kJ mole-1. Since we have about 2.55e+03 SPC molecules the potential energy should be about -1.1e+5 kJ mol-1. If the potential energy after minimization is lower than -1.1e+05 kJ mol-1 it is acceptable and the structure can be used for MD calculations. After our EM calculation the program prints something like: 

STEEPEST DESCENTS converged to 2000
  Potential Energy  = -1.19482e+05

which means our criterium is met, and we can proceed to the next step.

Perform a short MD run with position restraints on the peptide

Position restrained MD means Molecular Dynamics in which a part of the system is not allowed to move far off their starting positions. To be able to run with position restraints we must add a section to the speptide.top file, describing which atoms are to be restrained. Such a section is actually generated by the pdb2gmx program. In the topology file it looks like 

#ifdef POSRES

#include "posres.itp"

#endif

In the topology file we use conditional inclusion, i.e. only if a variable POSRES is set in the preprocessor do we include the file, this allows us to use the same topology file for runs with and without position restraints. In the pr.mdp parameter file for the position restraints this variable is set indeed: 

define              =  -DPOSRES

At last we can generate the input for the position restrained mdrun:

grompp -f pr -o pr -c after_em -r after_em -p speptide

Now it's MDrun time:

mdrun -v -s pr -e pr -o pr -c after_pr -g prlog >& pr.job &

This run is started in the background (it will take a while), you can watch how long it will take by typing:

tail -f pr.job

With the Ctrl-C key you can kill the tail command. A good check of your simulation is to see whether density and potential energies have converged:

g_energy -f pr -o out -w

The g_energy program will prompt you to select a number of energy terms from a list. For potential energy type:

9 0

If you have the xmgr program installed it will automatically pop up on your screen with the energy plot. You can do the same for the density and other energy terms, such as Solvent-Protein interactions.

Perform full MD without restraints

Full MD is very similar to the restrained MD as far as GROMACS is concerned. Check out the full.mdp for details.

grompp -v -f full -o full -c after_pr -p speptide

Then we can start mdrunning

mdrun -v -s full -e full -o full -c after_full -g flog >& full.job &

You should do similar convergence checks (and more!) as for the position restrained simulation.


Analysis

We will not describe analysis in detail, because most analysis tools are described in the Analysis chapter of the printed manual. We just list a few of the possibilities within GROMACS. By now you should be able to start programs yourself.

  1. View the trajectory on your own X-screen (program ngmx).

    ngmx -s pr -f full

    What happens to the peptide?

  2. The Root Mean Square Deviation (RMSD) with respect to the crystal structure (program g_rms) is a measure of how well the crystal (starting) structure is maintained in the simulation. The RMSD at time t is computed as <(r(t)-r(0))2>1/2 after performing a least squares super position of the structure at time t onto the structure at time 0.

    g_rms -s pr -f full -o rmsd

    Select the 1 for the number of groups, and select Calpha (Ca) for fitting and for computing the RMSD. View the output graph with xmgrace.

    xmgrace rmsd.xvg

    Does the RMSD converge within the simulation? If not, what does this indicate?

  3. The Radius of Gyration (Rg, program g_gyrate)) is a measure of the size of the protein. It is computed as the mean square distance of atoms from the center of mass of the molecule: Rg(t) = SUMi=1 .. N (ri-rcom)2

    g_gyrate -s pr -f full -o gyrate

    View the graph with xmgrace:

    xmgrace gyrate.xvg

    Does the radius of gyration change during the simulation?

  4. The Ramachandran Plot shows whether the backbone torsion angles (φ/ψ) of your peptide are within the allowed region. (program g_rama).

    g_rama -s pr -f full -o rama

    View the graph with xmgrace:

    xmgrace rama.xvg

    Here you have all the backbone torsion angles from the trajectory. Are all the angles in the allowed region? What kind of structure do the angles indicate?

  5. A salt bridge analysis (program g_saltbr) will tell you whether there are any saltbridges formed or broken during the simulation. It will also tell you about repulsive electrostatic interactions.

    g_saltbr -s pr -f full -t 0.5 -sep

    This will generate four graphs (in xmgrace format). Two of them refer to attractive interactions. You can view the graphs with xmgrace:

    xmgrace sb-GLU2:ARG10.xvg sb-GLU2:LYSH7.xvg -legend load

    Which interaction is the strongest? Look at the peptide molecule again (using rasmol). Which atoms form the closest contact in the saltbridge?

  6. Secondary Structure analysis (program my_dssp). This analysis uses the dssp (dictionary of secondary structure in proteins, Kabsch & Sander, 1983) software.

    my_dssp -s pr -f full

    Select protein when asked to select a group. You can postprecess the output file with:

    xpm2ps -f ss.xpm -o ss.eps

    This will give you a postscript file which you can either print or view with xpsview.

    xpsview ss.eps

    What happens to the Alpha helix (in blue)?



You have been witness of a full MD simulation starting from a pdb-file. It's that easy, but then again, maybe it was not that easy. The example presented here is a real example, this is how a production run should be performed, the complexity is in the process itself and not in the software (at least, that's our opinion).

Go to the next step