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In recent years Markov State Models (MSMs) have attracted a consid-
erable amount of attention with regard to modelling conformation changes and associated function of biomolecular systems. They have been used successfully, e.g., for peptides including time-resolved spectroscopic experiments, protein function and protein folding , DNA and RNA, and ligand-receptor interaction in drug design and more complicated multivalent scenarios. In this article a novel reweighting scheme is introduced that allows to construct an MSM for certain molecular system out of an MSM for a similar system. This permits studying how molecular properties on long timescales differ between similar molecular systems without performing full molecular dynamics simulations for each system under con-
sideration. The performance of the reweighting scheme is illustrated for simple test cases including one where the main wells of the respective energy landscapes are located differently and an alchemical transformation of butane to pentane where the dimension of the state space is changed.
Multivalent sugar/protein interactions are well-known to proceed through different binding modes 1-5 which in turn can be described by their binding kinetics 3-5. This study provides additional insight into the association and dissociation reaction rates of complex multivalent sugar/protein interactions. Binding kinetics of recently introduced multivalent precision glycomacromolecules 6-8 to Concanavalin A (Con A) were studied by " kinetic Isothermal Titration Calorimetry " (kinITC) 9-11. The effect of multivalency is evaluated by comparing rate constants of glycomacromolecules obtaining the same and different valency of mannose ligands and by variation of the overall backbone properties, such as hydrophilic/ hydrophoboc. In addition, binding kinetics were studied using different conformations of Con A (homodimer vs.-tetramer) and thus a different protein valency. Our results show that precision glycomacromolecule/Con A binding proceeds non-cooperatively. Further, association and dissociation rates are mainly described by intermolecular complex formation. Together with the so-called functional valency, we can discriminate between " bound " and " unbound " states for macroscopic on-and off-rates, even for such complex glycooligomer/protein systems. By comparing e.g. a mono-to a divalent glycomacromolecule for their binding to dimeric Con A, we see a lower dissociation rate for the latter. As both bind monovalently to Con A, this is a strong indication for a statistical rebinding event. Further, there is a strong dependence of multivalent binding kinetics on the ligand density of glycomacromolecules as well as the Con A conformation and thus the overall on-and off-rates.
Molecular processes such as protein folding or ligand-receptor-binding can be understood by analyzing the free energy landscape. Those processes are often metastable, i.e. the molecular systems remain in basins around local minima of the free energy landscape, and in rare cases undergo gauche transitions between metastable states by passing saddle-points of this landscape. By discretizing the configuration space, this can be modeled as a discrete Markov process. One way to compute the transition rates between conformations of a molecular system is by utilizing Transition Path Theory and the concept of committor functions. A fundamental problem from the computational point of view is that many time-scales are involved, ranging from 10^(-14) sec for the fastest motion to 10^(-6) sec or more for conformation changes that cause biological effects.
The goal of our work is to provide a better understanding of such transitions in configuration space on various time-scales by analyzing characteristic scalar functions topologically and geometrically. We are developing suitable visualization and interaction techniques to support our analysis. For example, we are analyzing a transition rate indicator function by computing and visualizing its Reeb graph together with the sets of molecular states corresponding to maxima of the transition rate indicator function. A particular challenge is the high dimensionality of the domain which does not allow for a straightforward visualization of the function.
The computational topology approach to the analysis of the transition rate indicator functions for a molecular system allows to explore different time scales of the system by utilizing coarser or finer topological partitioning of the function. A specific goal is the development of tools for analyzing the hierarchy of these partitionings. This approach tackles the analysis of a complex and sparse dataset from a different angle than the well-known spectral analysis of Markov State Models.
Finding metastable sets as dominant structures of Markov processes has been shown to be especially useful in modeling interesting slow dynamics of various real world complex processes. Furthermore, coarse graining of such processes based on their dominant structures leads to better understanding and dimension reduction of observed systems. However, in many cases, e.g. for nonreversible Markov processes, dominant structures are often not formed by metastable sets but by important cycles or mixture of both. This paper aims at understanding and identifying these different types of dominant structures for reversible as well as nonreversible ergodic Markov processes. Our algorithmic approach generalizes spectral based methods for reversible process by using Schur decomposition techniques which can tackle also nonreversible cases. We illustrate the mathematical construction of our new approach by numerical experiments.
Reversible Markov chains are the basis of many applications. However, computing transition probabilities by a finite sampling of a Markov chain can lead to truncation errors. Even if the original Markov chain is reversible, the approximated Markov chain might be non-reversible and will lose important properties, like the real valued spectrum. In this paper, we show how to find the closest reversible Markov chain to a given transition matrix. It turns out that this matrix can be computed by solving a convex minimization problem.
In this article we present a new idea for approximating exit rates for diffusion processes living in a craggy landscape. We are especially interested in the exit rates of a process living in a metastable regions. Due to the fact that Monte Carlo simulations perform quite poor and are very computational expensive in this setting we create several similar situations with a smoothed potential. For this we introduce a new parameter $\lambda \in [0,1]$ ($\lambda = 1$ very smoothed potential, $\lambda=0$ original potential) into the potential which controls the influence the smoothing. We then sample the exit rate for different parameters $\lambda$ the exit rate from a given region. Due to the fact that $\lambda$ is connected to the exit rate we can use this dependency to approximate the real exit rate. The method can be seen as something between hyperdynamics and temperature accelerated MC.
Spectral clustering methods are based on solving eigenvalue problems for the identification of clusters, e.g., the identification of metastable subsets of a Markov chain. Usually, real-valued eigenvectors are mandatory for this type of algorithms. The Perron Cluster Analysis (PCCA+) is a well-known spectral clustering method of Markov chains. It is applicable for reversible Markov chains, because reversibility implies a real-valued spectrum. We extend this spectral clustering method also to non-reversible Markov chains and give some illustrative examples. The main idea is to replace the eigenvalue problem by a real-valued Schur decomposition. By this extension, non-reversible Markov chains can be analyzed. Furthermore, the chains need not have a positive stationary distribution. And additionally to metastabilities, dominant cycles and sinks can be identified, too.