A Practical Guide to All-Atom and Coarse-Grained Molecular Dynamics Simulations Using Amber and Gromacs: A Case Study of Disulfide-Bond Impact on the Intrinsically Disordered Amyloid Beta

Abstract

Intrinsically disordered proteins (IDPs) pose challenges to conventional experimental techniques due to their large-scale conformational fluctuations and transient structural elements. This work presents computational methods for studying IDPs at various resolutions using the Amber and Gromacs packages with both all-atom (Amber ff19SB with the OPC water model) and coarse-grained (Martini 3 and SIRAH) approaches. The effectiveness of these methodologies is demonstrated by examining the monomeric form of amyloid-β (Aβ42), an IDP, with and without disulfide bonds at different resolutions. Our results clearly show that the addition of a disulfide bond decreases the β-content of Aβ42; however, it increases the tendency of the monomeric Aβ42 to form fibril-like conformations, explaining the various aggregation rates observed in experiments. Moreover, analysis of the monomeric Aβ42 compactness, secondary structure content, and comparison between calculated and experimental chemical shifts demonstrates that all three methods provide a reasonable choice to study IDPs; however, coarse-grained approaches may lack some atomistic details, such as secondary structure recognition, due to the simplifications used. In general, this study not only explains the role of disulfide bonds in Aβ42 but also provides a step-by-step protocol for setting up, conducting, and analyzing molecular dynamics (MD) simulations, which is adaptable for studying other biomacromolecules, including folded and disordered proteins and peptides.