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Free Energy Landscape and Rate Estimation of the Aromatic Ring Flips in Basic Pancreatic Trypsin Inhibitor Using Metadynamics

Aromatic side-chains (phenylalanine and tyrosine) of a protein flip by 180° around the Cβ − Cγ axis (χ2 dihedral of side-chain) producing two symmetry-equivalent states. The ring-flip dynamics act as an NMR probe to understand local conformational fluctuations. Ring-flips are categorized as slow (ms onwards) or fast (ns to near ms) based on timescales accessible to NMR experiments. In this study, we investigated the ability of the infrequent metadynamics approach to discriminate between slow and fast ring-flips for eight individual aromatic side-chains (F4, Y10, Y21, F22, Y23, F33, Y35, F45) of basic pancreatic trypsin inhibitor (BPTI). Well-tempered metadynamics simulations were performed to observe ring-flipping free energy surfaces for all eight aromatic residues. The results indicate that χ2 as a standalone collective variable (CV) is not sufficient to classify fast and slow ring-flips. Most of the residues needed χ1 (N − Cα) as a complementary CV, indicating the importance of librational motions in ring-flips. Multiple pathways and mechanisms were observed for residues F4, Y10, and F22. Recrossing events are observed for residues F22 and F33, indicating a possible role of friction effects in the ring-flipping. The results demonstrate the successful application of the metadynamics based approach to estimate ring-flip rates of aromatic residues in BPTI and identify certain limitations of the approach.