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Abstract In recent years, photoactive proteins such as rhodopsins have become a common target for cutting-edge research in the field of optogenetics. Alongside wet-lab research, computational methods are also developing rapidly to provide the necessary tools to analyze and rationalize experimental results and, most of all, drive the design of novel systems. The Automatic Rhodopsin Modeling (ARM) protocol is focused on providing exactly the necessary computational tools to study rhodopsins, those being either natural or resulting from mutations. The code has evolved along the years to finally provide results that arereproducibleby any user,accurateandreliableso as to replicate experimental trends. Furthermore, the code isefficientin terms of necessary computing resources and time, andscalablein terms of both number of concurrent calculations as well as features. In this review, we will show how the code underlying ARM achieved each of these properties.
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Automated QM/MM Screening of Rhodopsin Variants with Enhanced Fluorescence
We present a computational protocol for the fast and automated screening of excited-state hybrid quantum mechanics/molecular mechanics (QM/MM) models of rhodopsins to be used as fluorescent probes based on the automatic rhodopsin modeling protocol (a-ARM). Such “a-ARM fluorescence screening protocol” is implemented through a general Python-based driver, PyARM, that is also proposed here. The implementation and performance of the protocol are benchmarked using different sets of rhodopsin variants whose absorption and, more relevantly, emission spectra have been experimentally assessed. We show that, despite important limitations that make unsafe to use it as a black-box tool, the protocol reproduces the observed trends in fluorescence and it is capable of selecting novel potentially fluorescent rhodopsins. We also show that the protocol can be used in mechanistic investigations to discern fluorescence enhancement effects associated with a near degeneracy of the S1/S2 states or, alternatively, with a barrier generated via coupling of the S0/S1 wave functions.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1710191
- PAR ID:
- 10383321
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Journal of chemical theory and computation
- ISSN:
- 1549-9618
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.jctc.2c00928
