ff14IDPs Force Field Improving the Conformation Sampling of Intrinsically Disordered Proteins

Intrinsically disordered proteins are proteins which lack of specific tertiary structure and unable to fold spontaneously without the partner binding. These intrinsically disordered proteins are found to associate with various diseases, such as diabetes, cancer, and neurodegenerative diseases. However, current widely used force fields, such as ff99SB, ff14SB, OPLS/AA, and Charmm27, are insufficient in sampling the conformational characters of intrinsically disordered proteins. In this study, the CMAP method was used to correct the phi/ distributions of disorder-promoting amino acids. The simulation results show that the force filed parameters (ff14IDPs) can improve the phi/ distributions of the disorder-promoting amino acids, with RMSD less than 0.10% relative to the benchmark data of intrinsically disordered proteins. Further test suggests that the calculated secondary chemical shifts under ff14IDPs are in quantitative agreement with the data of NMR experiment for five tested systems. In addition, the simulation results show that ff14IDPs can still be used to model structural proteins, such as tested lysozyme and ubiquitin, with better performance in coil regions than the original general Amber force field ff14SB. These findings confirm that the newly developed Amber ff14IDPs is a robust model for improving the conformation sampling of intrinsically disordered proteins.