The determination of protein structure and the exploration of protein folding landscapes are two of the key problems in computational biology. In order to address these challenges, both a protein model that accurately captures the physics of interest and an efficient sampling algorithm are required. The first part of this thesis documents the continued development of CRANKITE, a coarse-grained protein model, and its energy landscape exploration using nested sampling, a Bayesian sampling algorithm. We extend CRANKITE and optimize its parameters using a maximum likelihood approach. The efficiency of our procedure, using the contrastive divergence approximation, allows a large training set to be used, producing a model which is transferable to proteins not included in the training set. We develop an empirical Bayes model for the prediction of protein β-contacts, which are required inputs for CRANKITE. Our approach couples the constraints and prior knowledge associated with β-contacts to a maximum entropy-based statistic which predicts evolutionarily-related contacts. Nested sampling (NS) is a Bayesian algorithm shown to be efficient at sampling systems which exhibit a first-order phase transition. In this work we parallelize the algorithm and, for the first time, apply it to a biophysical system: small globular proteins modelled using CRANKITE. We generate energy landscape charts, which give a large-scale visualization of the protein folding landscape, and we compare the efficiency of NS to an alternative sampling technique, parallel tempering, when calculating the heat capacity of a short peptide. In the final part of the thesis we adapt the NS algorithm for use within a molecular dynamics framework and demonstrate the application of the algorithm by calculating the thermodynamics of allatom models of a small peptide, comparing results to the standard replica exchange approach. This adaptation will allow NS to be used with more realistic force fields in the future.
Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:640947 |
Date | January 2014 |
Creators | Burkoff, Nikolas S. |
Publisher | University of Warwick |
Source Sets | Ethos UK |
Detected Language | English |
Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
Source | http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/66470/ |
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