For an analysis of a molecular system from a computational statistical thermodynamics point of view, extensive
molecular dynamics simulations are very inefficient. During this procedure, at lot of redundant data is generated. Whereas
the algorithms spend most of the computing time for a sampling of configurations within the basins of the potential energy
landscape of the molecular system, the important information about the long-time behaviour of the molecules is given by
transition regions and barriers between the basins, which are sampled rarely only. Thinking of molecular dynamics trajectories,
researchers try to figure out which kind of dynamical model is suitable for an efficient simulation. This article suggests to
change the point of view from extensive simulation of molecular dynamics trajectories to more efficient sampling strategies
of the conformation dynamics approach.
Particle methods have become indispensible in conformation dynamics to compute transition rates in protein folding, binding processes and molecular design, to mention a few. Conformation dynamics requires at a decomposition of a molecule's position space into metastable conformations. In this paper, we show how this decomposition can be obtained via the design of either ``soft'' or ``hard'' molecular conformations. We show, that the soft approach results in a larger metastabilitiy of the decomposition and is thus more advantegous. This is illustrated by a simulation of Alanine Dipeptide.
Supercomputers can simulate complex molecular systems. However, there is a very large gap between the fastest oscillations of covalent bonds of a molecule and the time-scale of the dominant processes. In order to extract the dominant time-scales and to identify the dominant processes, a clustering of information is needed. This thesis shows that only the subspace-based Robust Perron Cluster Analysis (PCCA+) can solve this problem correctly by the construction of a Markov State Model. PCCA+ allows for time-extrapolation in molecular kinetics. This thesis shows the difference between molecular dynamics and molecular kinetics. Only in the molecular kinetics framework a definition of transition rates is possible. In this context, the existence of an infinitesimal generator of the dynamical processes is discussed. If the existence is assumed, the Theorem of Gauß can be applied in order to compute transition rates efficiently. Molecular dynamics, however, is not able to provide a suitable statistical basis for the determination of the transition pattern.
Markov state models have become very popular for the description of conformation dynamics of molecules over
long timescales. The construction of such models requires a partitioning of the configuration space such that the discretization
can serve as an approximation of metastable conformations. Since the computational complexity for the construction of a
Markov state model increases quadratically with the number of sets, it is desirable to obtain as few sets as necessary. In this
paper we propose an algorithm for the adaptive refinement of an initial coarse partitioning. A spectral clustering method is
applied to the final partitioning to detect the metastable conformations. We apply this method to the conformation analysis of
a model tri-peptide molecule, where metastable beta- and gamma-turn conformations can be identified.
In this article we show, that the binding kinetics of a molecular system can be
identied by a projection of a continuous process onto a nite number of macro states. We thus
interpret binding kinetics as a projection. When projecting onto non-overlapping macro states the
Markovianity is spoiled. As a consequence, the description of e.g. a receptor-ligand system by a two
state kinetics is not accurate. By assigning a degree of membership to each state, we abandon the
non-overlapping approach. This overlap is crucial for a correct mapping of binding eects by Markov
State Models with regard to their long time behavior. It enables us to describe the highly discussed
rebinding eect, where the spatial arrangement of the system has the be included. By introducing
a \degree of fuzziness" we have an indicator for the strength of the rebinding eect, such that the
minimal rebinding eect can be derived from an optimization problem. The fuzziness also includes
some new paradigms for molecular kinetics. These new model paradigms show good agreement with
experimental data.
Trajectory- or mesh-based methods for analyzing the dynamical behavior of large
molecules tend to be impractical due to the curse of dimensionality - their computational cost increases
exponentially with the size of the molecule. We propose a method to break the curse by a
novel square root approximation of transition rates, Monte Carlo quadrature and a discretization
approach based on solving linear programs. With randomly sampled points on the molecular energy
landscape and randomly generated discretizations of the molecular conguration space as our initial
data, we construct a matrix describing the transition rates between adjacent discretization regions.
This transition rate matrix yields a Markov State Model of the molecular dynamics. We use Perron
cluster analysis and coarse-graining techniques in order to identify metastable sets in conguration
space and approximate the transition rates between the metastable sets. Application of our method
to a simple energy landscape on a two-dimensional conguration space provides proof of concept and
an example for which we compare the performance of dierent discretizations. We show that the
computational cost of our method grows only polynomially with the size of the molecule. However,
nding discretizations of higher-dimensional conguration spaces in which metastable sets can be
identied remains a challenge.
Markov State Models (MSMs) are widely used to represent molecular
conformational changes as jump-like transitions between subsets of the conformational
state space. However, the simulation of peptide folding in explicit water is
usually said to be unsuitable for the MSM framework. In this article, we summarize
the theoretical background of MSMs and indicate that explicit water simulations do
not contradict these principles. The algorithmic framework of a meshless conformational
space discretization is applied to an explicit water system and the sampling
results are compared to a long-term molecular dynamics trajectory. The meshless
discretization approach is based on spectral clustering of stochastic matrices (MSMs)
and allows for a parallelization of MD simulations. In our example of Trialanine we
were able to compute the same distribution of a long term simulation in less computing
time.