PRIMO: A Transferable Coarse-Grained Force Field for Proteins

We describe here the PRIMO (protein intermediate model) force field, a physics-based fully transferable additive coarse-grained potential energy function that is compatible with an all-atom force field for multiscale simulations. The energy function consists of standard molecular dynamics energy terms plus a hydrogen-bonding potential term and is mainly parametrized based on the CHARMM22/CMAP force field in a bottom-up fashion. The solvent is treated implicitly via the generalized Born model. The bonded interactions are either harmonic or distance-based spline interpolated potentials. These potentials are defined on the basis of all-atom molecular dynamics (MD) simulations of dipeptides with the CHARMM22/CMAP force field. The nonbonded parameters are tuned by matching conformational free energies of diverse set of conformations with that of CHARMM all-atom results. PRIMO is designed to provide a correct description of conformational distribution of the backbone (φ/ψ) and side chains (χ 1 ) for all amino acids with a CMAP correction term. The CMAP potential in PRIMO is optimized based on the new CHARMM C36 CMAP. The resulting optimized force field has been applied in MD simulations of several proteins of 36–155 amino acids and shown that the root-mean-squared-deviation of the average structure from the corresponding crystallographic structure varies between 1.80 and 4.03 Å. PRIMO is shown to fold several small peptides to their native-like structures from extended conformations. These results suggest the applicability of the PRIMO force field in the study of protein structures in aqueous solution, structure predictions, as well as ab initio folding of small peptides.