Molecular dynamics (MD) simulations with full-dimensional potential energy surfaces (PESs) obtained from high-level ab initio calculations are frequently used to model reaction dynamics of small molecules (i.e., molecules with up to 10 atoms). Construction of full-dimensional PESs for larger molecules is, however, not feasible since the number of ab initio calculations required grows rapidly with the increase of dimension. Only a small number of coordinates are often essential for describing the reactivity of even very large systems, and reduced-dimensional PESs with these coordinates can be built for reaction dynamics studies. While analytical methods based on transition-state theory framework are well established for analyzing the reduced-dimensionalPESs, MD simulation algorithms capable of generating trajectories on such surfaces are more rare. In this work, we present a new MD implementation that utilizes the relaxed reduced-dimensional PES for standard micro canonical (NVE) and canonical (NVT) MD simulations.The method is applied to the pyramidal inversion of a NH3molecule. The results from the MD simulations on a reduced, three-dimensional PES are validated against the ab initio MD simulations, as well as MD simulations on full-dimensional PES and experimental data.
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3D ab initio modeling in cryo-EM by autocorrelation analysis
Single-Particle Reconstruction (SPR) in Cryo-Electron Microscopy (cryo-EM) is the task of estimating the 3D structure of a molecule from a set of noisy 2D projections, taken from unknown viewing directions. Many algorithms for SPR start from an initial reference molecule, and alternate between refining the estimated viewing angles given the molecule, and refining the molecule given the viewing angles. This scheme is called iterative refinement. Reliance on an initial, user-chosen reference introduces model bias, and poor initialization can lead to slow convergence. Furthermore, since no ground truth is available for an unsolved molecule, it is difficult to validate the obtained results. This creates the need for high quality ab initio models that can be quickly obtained from experimental data with minimal priors, and which can also be used for validation. We propose a procedure to obtain such an ab initio model directly from raw data using Kam's autocorrelation method. Kam's method has been known since 1980, but it leads to an underdetermined system, with missing orthogonal matrices. Until now, this system has been solved only for special cases, such as highly symmetric molecules or molecules for which a homologous structure was already available. In this paper, we show that knowledge of just two clean projections is sufficient to guarantee a unique solution to the system. This system is solved by an optimization-based heuristic. For the first time, we are then able to obtain a low-resolution ab initio model of an asymmetric molecule directly from raw data, without 2D class averaging and without tilting. Numerical results are presented on both synthetic and experimental data.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1719558
- PAR ID:
- 10059456
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Biomedical Imaging (ISBI 2018), 2018 IEEE 15th International Symposium on
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1569 - 1573
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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