Nucleoside free energy perturbation calculations: Mutation of purine-to-pyrimidine and pyrimidine-to-purine nucleosides

Predicting the effects of basepair mutations in DNA-protein complexes by thermodynamic integration

Thermodynamically rigorous free energy methods in principle allow the exact computation of binding free energies in biological systems. Here, we use thermodynamic integration together with molecular dynamics simulations of a DNA-protein complex to compute relative binding free energies of a series of mutants of a protein-binding DNA operator sequence. A guanine-cytosine basepair that interacts strongly with the DNA-binding protein is mutated into adenine-thymine, cytosine-guanine, and thymine-adenine. It is shown that basepair mutations can be performed using a conservative protocol that gives error estimates of ∼10% of the change in free energy of binding. Despite the high CPU-time requirements, this work opens the exciting opportunity of being able to perform basepair scans to investigate protein-DNA binding specificity in great detail computationally.

The hydration and solvent polarization effects of nucleotide bases

A combined Monte Carlo quantum mechanical and molecular mechanical (QM/MM) simulation method is used to determine the free energy of hydration and the solvent polarization effect for the nucleotide bases. In the present AM1/TIP3P model, the solute molecule is characterized by valence electrons and effective nucleus cores with Hartree-Fock molecular orbital theory incorporating a solute-solvent interaction Hamiltonian. It is found that polarization energy contributes up to 37%-61% of the total solute-solvent interaction for the systems considered. The computed free energies of hydration are compared with previous theoretical results.