Temperature and Pressure Dependence of Alanine Dipeptide Studied by Multibaric−Multithermal Molecular Dynamics Simulations

Abstract

We applied the multibaric-multithermal (MUBATH) molecular dynamics (MD) algorithm to an alanine dipeptide in explicit water. The MUBATH MD simulation covered a wide range of conformational space and sampled the states of PII, C5, alphaR, alphaP, alphaL, and C7(ax). On the other hand, the conventional isobaric-isothermal simulation was trapped in local-minimum free-energy states and sampled only a few of them. We calculated the partial molar enthalpy difference DeltaH and partial molar volume difference DeltaV among these states by the MUBATH simulation using the AMBER parm99 and AMBER parm96 force fields and two sets of initial conditions. We compared these results with those from Raman spectroscopy experiments. The Raman spectroscopy data of DeltaH for the C5 state against the PII state agreed with both MUBATH data with the AMBER parm96 and parm99 force fields. The partial molar enthalpy difference DeltaH for the alphaR state and the partial molar volume difference DeltaV for the C5 state by the Raman spectroscopy agreed with those for the AMBER parm96 force field. On the other hand, DeltaV for the alphaR state by the Raman spectroscopy was consistent with our AMBER-parm99 force-field result. All the experimental results fall between those of simulations using AMBER parm96 and parm99 force fields, suggesting that the ideal force-field parameters lie between those of AMBER parm96 and parm99.