A Guide to the Continuous Constant pH Molecular Dynamics Methods in Amber and CHARMM [Article v1.0]

Abstract

Like temperature and pressure, solution pH is an important environmental variable in biomolecular simulations. Virtually all proteins depend on pH to maintain their structure and function.  In conventional molecular dynamics (MD) simulations of proteins, pH is implicitly accounted for by assigning and fixing protonation states of titratable sidechains. This is a significant drawback, as the assigned protonation states may be wrong and they may change during dynamics. In this tutorial, we guide the reader in learning and using the various continuous constant pH MD methods in Amber and CHARMM packages, which have been applied to predict pK_a values and elucidate proton-coupled conformational dynamics of a variety of proteins including enzymes and membrane transporters.