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Metadynamics calculations of large chemical systems with ab initio methods are computationally prohibitive due to the extensive sampling required to simulate the large degrees of freedom in these systems. To address this computational bottleneck, we utilized a GPU-enhanced density functional tight binding (DFTB) approach on a massively parallelized cloud computing platform to efficiently calculate the thermodynamics and metadynamics of biochemical systems. To first validate our approach, we calculated the free-energy surfaces of alanine dipeptide and showed that our GPU-enhanced DFTB calculations qualitatively agree with computationally-intensive hybrid DFT benchmarks, whereas classical force fields give significant errors. Most importantly, we show that our GPU-accelerated DFTB calculations are significantly faster than previous approaches by up to two orders of magnitude. To further extend our GPU-enhanced DFTB approach, we also carried out a 10 ns metadynamics simulation of remdesivir, which is prohibitively out of reach for routine DFT-based metadynamics calculations. We find that the free-energy surfaces of remdesivir obtained from DFTB and classical force fields differ significantly, where the latter overestimates the internal energy contribution of high free-energy states. Taken together, our benchmark tests, analyses, and extensions to large biochemical systems highlight the use of GPU-enhanced DFTB simulations for efficiently predicting the free-energy surfaces/thermodynamics of large biochemical systems. 

Enzymes are extremely complex catalytic structures with immense biological and technological importance. Nevertheless, their widespread environmental implementation faces several challenges, including high production costs, low operational stability, and intricate recovery and reusability. Therefore, the de novo design of minimalistic biomolecular nanomaterials that can efficiently mimic the biocatalytic function (bionanozymes) and overcome the limitations of natural enzymes is a critical goal in biomolecular engineering. Here, we report an exceptionally simple yet highly active and robust single amino acid bionanozyme that can catalyze the rapid oxidation of environmentally toxic phenolic contaminates and serves as an ultrasensitive tool to detect biologically important neurotransmitters similar to the laccase enzyme. While inspired by the laccase catalytic site, the substantially simpler copper-coordinated bionanozyme is ∼5400 times more cost-effective, four orders more efficient, and 36 times more sensitive compared to the natural protein. Furthermore, the designed mimic is stable under extreme conditions (pH, ionic strength, temperature, storage time), markedly reusable for several cycles, and displays broad substrate specificity. These findings hold great promise in developing efficient bionanozymes for analytical chemistry, environmental protection, and biotechnology.

 

Optical transmission and scattering spectroscopic microscopy at the visible and adjacent wavelengths denote one of the most informative and inclusive characterization methods in material research. Unfortunately, restricted by the diffraction limit of light, it cannot resolve the nanoscale variation in light absorption and scattering, diagnostics of the local inhomogeneity in material structure and properties. Moreover, a large quantity of nanomaterials has anisotropic optical properties that are appealing yet hard to characterize through conventional optical methods. There is an increasing demand to extend the optical hyperspectral imaging into the nanometer length scale. In this work, we report a super-resolution hyperspectral imaging technique that uses a nanoscale white light source generated by superfocusing the light from a tungsten-halogen lamp to simultaneously obtain optical transmission and scattering spectroscopic images. A 6-nm spatial resolution in the visible to near-infrared wavelength regime (415–980 nm) is demonstrated on an individual single-walled carbon nanotube (SW-CNT). Both the longitudinal and transverse optical electronic transitions are measured, and the SW-CNT chiral indices can be identified. The band structure modulation in a SW-CNT through strain engineering is mapped.