Enzymatic Minimum Free Energy Path Calculations Using Swarms of Trajectories

The development of approaches for simulating rare events in complex molecular systems is a central concern in chemical physics. In recent work, Rout and co-workers proposed a novel, swarms of trajectories (SoT) method for determining the transition paths of such events. It consists of the dynamical refinement on the system's free energy surface of a putative transition path that is parametrized in terms of a set of collective variables (CVs) that are identified as being important for the transition. In this work, we have implemented the SoT method and used it to investigate the catalytic mechanisms of two enzymatic reactions using hybrid QM/MM potentials. Our aim has been to test the performance of SoT for enzyme systems and to devise robust simulation protocols that can be employed in future studies of this type. We identify the conditions under which converged results can be obtained using inertial and Brownian dynamical evolutions of the CVs, show that the inclusion of several CVs can give significant additional insight into the mechanisms of the reactions, and show that the use of minimum energy paths as starting guesses can greatly accelerate path refinement.