After having recently published a large scale Molecular Dynamics simulations project of TCRpMHC [1,2] interaction I have extended my research to another technique of spatial sampling. At this week’s group meeting I presented the first results of my first MOSAICS [3] project.

The MOSAICS package is a software that allows for so called hierarchical natural Monte Carlo moves. That means that the user can specify regions in the protein of interest. These regions are indented to reflect “natural” sets of atoms and are expected to move together. An example would be a stable alpha-helix. “Hierarchical” means that region can be grouped together to super-regions. For example a helix that is broken by a kink [4] in its middle could have a region for the helix parts on both sides of the kink as well as for the overall helix. An example for peptide/MHC is illustrated below.

MOSAICS uses Monte Carlo moves to rearrange these region with respect to each other. A stochastic chain closure algorithm ensures that no chain breaks occur. An example of such movements in comparison to classical all-atom Molecular Dynamics is shown below.

In this study we used MOSAICS to simulate the detachment of peptides from MHCs for experimentally known binder and non-binder. An example of such a detaching peptide is shown below

Our results show that experimentally known non-binding peptides detach significantly faster from MHC than experimentally known binding peptides (results to be reported soon).

As a first conclusion of this project:
After having worked with both MOSAICS and Molecular Dynamics simulations, I think that both techniques have their advantages and disadvantages. They are summarized below:

Which technique should be chosen for which project depends mainly on what the aims of these projects are. If large moves of well defined segments are expected then MOSAICS might be the method of choice. If the aim is to investigate fine changes and detailed dynamics Molecular Dynamics simulations might be the better choice.

1.    Knapp B, Demharter S, Esmaielbeiki R, Deane CM (2015) Current Status and Future Challenges in T-cell receptor / peptide / MHC Molecular Dynamics Simulations. Brief Bioinform accepted.
2.    Knapp B, Dunbar J, Deane CM (2014) Large Scale Characterization of the LC13 TCR and HLA-B8 Structural Landscape in Reaction to 172 Altered Peptide Ligands: A Molecular Dynamics Simulation Study. PLoS Comput Biol 10: e1003748.
3.    Sim AY, Levitt M, Minary P (2012) Modeling and design by hierarchical natural moves. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A 109: 2890-2895.
4.    Wilman HR, Ebejer JP, Shi J, Deane CM, Knapp B (2014) Crowdsourcing yields a new standard for kinks in protein helices. J Chem Inf Model 54: 2585-2593.

At this week’s group meeting I presented my recently published paper:

Knapp B, Dunbar J, Deane CM. Large scale characterization of the LC13 TCR and HLA-B8 structural landscape in reaction to 172 altered peptide ligands: a molecular dynamics simulation study. PLoS Comput Biol. 2014 Aug 7;10(8):e1003748. doi: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1003748. 2014.

This paper was presented on the front page of PLoS Computational Biology:

The paper describes Molecular Dynamics simulations (MD) of T-cell receptor (TCR) / peptide / MHC complexes.

MD simulation calculate the movement of atoms of a given system over time. The zoomed-in movements of the TCR regions (CDRs) recognizing a peptide/MHC are shown here:

Often scientists perform MD simulations of two highly similar complexes with different immunological outcome. An example is the Epstein-Barr Virus peptide FLRGRAYGL which leads to induction of an immune response when presented by HLA-B*08:01 to the LC 13 TCR. If position 7 of the peptide is mutated to A then the peptide does not induce an immune reaction any-more.
In both simulations the TCR and MHC are identical only the peptide differs in one amino acid. Once the simulations of those two complexes are done one could for example investigate the root mean square fluctuation of both peptides to investigate if one of them is more flexible. And indeed this is the case:

Another type of analysis would be the solvent accessible surface area of the peptide or, as shown below, the CDR regions of the TCR beta chain:

… and again it is obvious that those two simulations strongly differ from each other.

Is it then a good idea to publish an article about these findings and state something like “Our results indicate that peptide flexibility and CDR solvent accessible surface area play an important in the activation of a T cell” ?

As we know from our statistics courses a 1 vs 1 comparison is an anecdotic example but those often do not hold true for larger sample sizes.

So, let’s try it with many more peptides and simulations (performing these simulations took almost 6 months on the Oxford Advanced Research Computing facility). We split the simulations in two categories, those which are more immunogenic and those which are less immunogenic:

Let’s see what happens to the difference in RMSF that we found before:

So much for “More immunogenic peptides are more/less flexible as less immunogenic ones” …

How about the SASA that we “found” before:

… again almost perfectly identical for larger sample sizes.

And yes, we have found some minor differences between more and less immunogenic peptides that hold true for larger sample sizes but non of them was striking enough to predict peptide immunogenicity based on MD simulations.

What one really learns from this study is that you should not compare 1 MD simulation against 1 other MD simulation as this will almost certainly lead to false positive findings. Exactly the same applies for experimental data such as x-ray structures because this is a statistical problem rather than a prediction based on. If you want to make sustainable claims about something that you found then you will need a large sample size and a proper statistical sample size estimation and power analysis (as done in clinical studies) before you run any simulations. Comparing structures is always massive multiple testing and therefore high sample sizes are needed to draw valid conclusions.

link pdf

This week’s topic of the Journalclub was about Molecular Mechanics Poisson−Boltzmann Surface Area (MMPBSA) binding free energy calculations between ligand and receptor using Molecular Dynamics simultions (MD). As an example I selected:

David W. Wright, Benjamin A. Hall, Owain A. Kenway, Shantenu Jha, and Peter V. Coveney. Computing Clinically Relevant Binding Free Energies of HIV-1 Protease Inhibitors. J Chem Theory Comput. Mar 11, 2014; 10(3): 1228–1241

The first question is: Why do we need such rather complex and computationally expensive approaches if other (e.g. empirical) scoring functions can do similar things? The main challenges thereby is that simple scoring functions often do not work very well for systems where they were not calibrated on (e.g. Knapp et al. 2009 (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19194661)). The reasons for that are manifold. MD-based approaches can improve two major limitations of classical docking/scoring functions:

1) Proteins are not static. Ligand as well as receptor can undergo various slightly different configurations even for one binding site. Therefore the view of scoring one ligand configuration against one receptor configuration is not the whole picture. The first improvement is to consider a lot of different configurations for one position score of the ligand:

2) A more physics based scoring function can be more reliable than a simple and run-time efficient scoring function. On the basis of the MD simulations a variety of different terms can be deduced. These include:

– MM stands for Molecular Mechanics. It’s internal energy includes bond stretch, bend, and torsion. The electrostatic part is calculated using a Coulomb potential while the Van der Waals term is calculated using a Lennard-Jones potential.
– PB stands for Poisson−Boltzmann. It covers the polar solvation part i.e. the electrostatic free energy of solvation.
– SA stands for Surface Area. It covers the non-polar solvation part via a surface tension weighted solvent accessible surface area calculation.
– TS stands for the entropy loss of the system. This term is necessary because the non-polar solvation incorporates an estimate of the entropy changes implicitly but does not account for an entropy change upon receptor/ligand formation in vacuo. This term is calculated on the basis of a normal mode analysis.

If all these terms are calculated for each single frame of the MD simulations and those single values are averaged an estimate of the binding free energy of the complex can be obtained. However, this estimate might not represent the actual mean of the spatial distribution. Therefore at least 50 replica MD simulations are needed per investigated complex. In this aspect replica means an identically parameterized simultion of the same complex where only the inital forces are assinged randomly.

On the basis of the described MMPBSA-TS approach in combination with 50 replicas the authors achieve a reasonable correlation (0.63) for the 9 FDA-approved HIV-1
protease inhibitors with know experimental binding affinities. If the two largest complexes are excluded the correlation improves to an excellent value (0.93).

In a current study we are using the same methodology for peptide/MHC interactions. This system is completely different from the protease inhibitor study of Wright et al.: The ligands are peptides and the binding site is a groove consisting of two alpha-helices. The methods was applied as it is (without calibration or any kind of training). Prelimiary data still shows a high correlation with experimental values for the peptide/MHC system. This indicates that this MMPBSA approach can yield reliable predictions for very different systems without further modification.

… a lot of useful presents as can be seen above … and yes our Christmas party is always in Januray.

Last time I gave a presentation about different papers describing Molecular Dynamics simulations of TCRpMHC (http://blopig.com/blog/?p=648&preview=true). This time I extended this to more of my own work. The focus of this talk was about the motivation why to choose a certain system and which requirements if must fulfíl for reliable conclusions. In short they are:

1) A larger number (>100) of experimental values (e.g. some kind of binding, immunogenicity, etc) of a certain TCRpMHC system. These values should be provided by:
– the same group
– the same HLA/MHC batches
– the same binding conditions
– in the ideal case in the same manuscript

The values should NOT be from a database since different experimental groups come to extremely different results for the same complexes as several examples show e.g.:
The binding IC50 affinity values of PKYVKQNTLKLAT to DRB1*01:01 range from 1nM and 600nM (IEDB entries).

2) Structural data exactly matching the systematic experimental data mentioned above. If multiple structures are involved they should be published by:

– the same group (in the ideal case even published together with the above mentioned data by the same group)
– be contemporary

Data which fulfil the above mentioned criteria is quite hard to find since most biologists are mainly interested in some fancy, however, rather anecdotal examples and rarely in systematic data production.

Once one has found such a system a large number of Molecular Dynamics simulations can be performed which will yield systematic differences not just differences originating from random events or data bias.