Earticle

In this manuscript, we report a protocol to determine most of the lowest energy conformations from the ensemble of conformations. 12-crown-4 was taken as study compound to get the most of energy minima conformations. Molecular dynamic (MD) simulation for 1 nanosecond (ns) was performed at 300, 500, 700, 900 and 1100 K temperature. At particular interval conformations were sampled. Then Gaussian program was used to minimize compounds using PM6 energy levels. Duplicates were removed by checking energy as well as mirror image conformations, and only unique conformations were retained for the next 6-31+G* level minimization. It was observed that upto certain increment in temperature the number of unique conformations were increased, but afterword it decreased.

Protein loops are often involved in diverse biological functions, and some functional loops show conformational changes upon ligand binding. Since this conformational change is directly related to ligand binding pose and protein function, there have been numerous attempts to predict this change accurately. In this study, we show that it is plausible to obtain meaningful ensembles of loop conformations for flexible, ligand-binding protein loops efficiently by applying a loop modeling method. The loop modeling method employs triaxial loop closure algorithm for trial conformation generation and conformational space annealing for global energy optimization. When loop modeling was performed on the framework of ligand-free structure, loop structures within $3\AA$ RMSD from the crystal loop structure for the ligand-bound state were sampled in 4 out of 6 cases. This result is encouraging considering that no information on the ligand-bound state was used during the loop modeling process. We therefore expect that the present loop modeling method will be useful for future developments of flexible protein-ligand docking methods.