92E10 Molecular structure (graph-theoretic methods, methods of differential topology, etc.)
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The understanding of geometric structures and dynamical properties of molecular conformations gives insight into molecular long-term behavior. The identification of metastable conformations together with their life times and transition patterns is the intention of conformation dynamics. Conformation dynamics is a multi-scale approach that leads to a reduced description of the dynamical system in terms of a stochastic transition probability matrix. The present thesis deals with the error analysis of computed matrices and the resulting matrix functions. Since conformational membership vectors, as they are computed by the Robust Perron Cluster Analysis (PCCA+), form an invariant subspace of the transition matrix, subspace-based error estimators are of particular interest. The decomposition of the state space into basis functions and the approximation of integrals by Monte-Carlo quadrature give rise to row-wise correlated random matrices, for which stochastic norms are computed. Together with an appropriate statistical model for the distribution of matrix rows, this allows for the calculation of error bounds and error distributions of the invariant subspace and other variables of interest. Equilibration of errors among the basis functions can be achieved by enhanced sampling in regions where the trajectories are mixing slowly. Hierarchical refinement of such basis functions systematically improves the clustering into metastable conformations by reducing the error in the corresponding invariant subspace. These techniques allow for an evaluation of simulation results and pave the way for the analysis of larger molecules. Moreover, the extension of PCCA+ to non-reversible Markov chains, verified by the corresponding perturbation theory, and the modification of the objective function for the case of soft membership vectors represent a further generalization of the clustering method, thus continuing the development from PCCA over PCCA+ to PCCA++. The methods developed in this thesis are useful for but not limited to conformation dynamics. In fact, they are applicable to a broader class of problems which combine domain decomposition with Monte-Carlo quadrature. Possible application areas may include the chemical master equation or quantum dynamical systems.
THESEUS, the ZIB threading environment, is a parallel implementation of a protein threading based on a multi-queued branch-and-bound optimal search algorithm to find the best sequence-to-structure alignment through a library of template structures. THESEUS uses a template core model based on secondary structure definition and a scoring function based on knowledge-based potentials reflecting pairwise interactions and the chemical environment, as well as pseudo energies for homology detection, loop alignment, and secondary structure matching. The threading core is implemented in C++ as a SPMD parallization architecture using MPI for communication. The environment is designed for generic testing of different scoring functions, e.g. different secondary structure prediction terms, different scoring matrices and information derived from multiple sequence alignments. A validaton of the structure prediction results has been done on the basis of standard threading benchmark sets. THESEUS successfully participated in the 6th Critical Assessment of Techniques for Protein Structure Prediction (CASP) 2004.
In order to compute the thermodynamic weights of the different metastable conformations of a molecule, we want to approximate the molecule's Boltzmann distribution in a reasonable time. This is an essential issue in computational drug design. The energy landscape of active biomolecules is generally very rough with a lot of high barriers and low regions. Many of the algorithms that perform such samplings (e.g. the hybrid Monte Carlo method) have difficulties with such landscapes. They are trapped in low-energy regions for a very long time and cannot overcome high barriers. Moving from one low-energy region to another is a very rare event. For these reasons, the distribution of the generated sampling points converges very slowly against the thermodynamically correct distribution of the molecule. The idea of ConfJump is to use $a~priori$ knowledge of the localization of low-energy regions to enhance the sampling with artificial jumps between these low-energy regions. The artificial jumps are combined with the hybrid Monte Carlo method. This allows the computation of some dynamical properties of the molecule. In ConfJump, the detailed balance condition is satisfied and the mathematically correct molecular distribution is sampled.
The identification of metastable conformations of molecules plays an important role in computational drug design. One main difficulty is the fact that the underlying dynamic processes take place in high dimensional spaces. Although the restriction of degrees of freedom to a few dihedral angles significantly reduces the complexity of the problem, the existing algorithms are time-consuming. They are based on the approximation of transition probabilities by an extensive sampling of states according to the Boltzmann distribution. We present a method which can identify metastable conformations without sampling the complete distribution. Our algorithm is based on local transition rates and uses only pointwise information about the potential energy surface. In order to apply the cluster algorithm PCCA+, we compute a few eigenvectors of the rate matrix by the Jacobi-Davidson method. Interpolation techniques are applied to approximate the thermodynamical weights of the clusters. The concluding example illustrates our approach for epigallocatechine, a molecule which can be described by seven dihedral angles.
The Monte Carlo simulation of the dynamics of complex molecules produces trajectories with a large number of different configurations to sample configuration space. It is expected that these configurations can be classified into a small number of conformations representing essential changes in the shape of the molecule. We present a method to visualize these conformations by point sets in the plane based on a geometrical distance measure between individual configurations. It turns out that different conformations appear as well-separated point sets. The method is further improved by performing a cluster analysis of the data set. The point-cluster representation is used to control a three-dimensional molecule viewer application to show individual configurations and conformational changes. The extraction of essential coordinates and visualization of molecular shape is discussed.
In molecular dynamics applications there is a growing interest in mixed quantum-classical models. The article is concerned with the so-called QCMD model. This model describes most atoms of the molecular system by the means of classical mechanics but an important, small portion of the system by the means of a wavefunction. We review the conditions under which the QCMD model is known to approximate the full quantum dynamical evolution of the system. In most quantum-classical simulations the {\em Born-Oppenheimer model} (BO) is used. In this model, the wavefunction is adiabatically coupled to the classical motion which leads to serious approximation deficiencies with respect to non-adiabatic effects in the fully quantum dynamical description of the system. In contrast to the BO model, the QCMD model does include non-adiabatic processes, e.g., transitions between the energy levels of the quantum system. It is demonstrated that, in mildly non-adiabatic scenarios, so-called {\em surface hopping} extensions of QCMD simulations yield good approximations of the non-adiabatic effects in full quantum dynamics. The algorithmic strategy of such extensions of QCMD is explained and the crucial steps of its realization are discussed with special emphasis on the numerical problems caused by highly oscillatory phase effects.
Recently, a novel concept for the computation of essential features of Hamiltonian systems (such as those arising in molecular dynamics) has been proposed. The realization of that concept was based on subdivision techniques applied to the Frobenius--Perron operator for the dynamical system. The present paper suggests an alternative but related concept based on statistical mechanics, which allows to attack realistic molecular systems. In a first step, the frequency of conformational changes is characterized in statistical terms leading to the definition of some Markov operator $T$ that describes the corresponding transition probabilities within the canonical ensemble. In a second step, a discretization of $T$ via hybrid Monte Carlo techniques (based on short term subtrajectories only) is shown to lead to a stochastic matrix $P$. With these theoretical preparations, an identification algorithm for conformations is applicable (to be presented elsewhere). Numerical results for the n-pentane molecule are given and interpreted.
