Replica exchange molecular dynamics: A practical application protocol with solutions to common problems and a peptide aggregation and self-assembly example

Protein aggregation is associated with many human diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease (AD), Parkinson’s disease (PD), and type II diabetes (T2D). Understanding the molecular mechanism of protein aggregation is essential for therapy development. Molecular dynamics (MD) simulations have been shown as powerful tools to study protein aggregation. However, conventional MD simulations can hardly sample the whole conformational space of complex protein systems within acceptable simulation time as it can be easily trapped in local minimum-energy states. Many enhanced sampling methods have been developed. Among these, the replica exchange molecular dynamics (REMD) method has gained great popularity. By combining MD simulation with the Monte Carlo algorithm, the REMD method is capable of overcoming high energy-barriers easily and of sampling sufficiently the conformational space of proteins. In this chapter, we present a brief introduction to REMD method and a practical application protocol with a case study of the dimerization of the 11–25 fragment of human islet amyloid polypeptide (hIAPP(11–25)), using the GROMACS software. We also provide solutions to problems that are often encountered in practical use, and provide some useful scripts/commands from our research that can be easily adapted to other systems.