Abstract
Molecular dynamics simulations of immune receptor and ligand proteins in their native membrane environment allow to determine the orientational and structural variability of the proteins and protein complexes. The simulations complement the static, “membrane-free” structural information obtained from cryo-EM structures of transmembrane proteins in detergent micelles or from crystal structures of extracellular protein domains. Here we describe how to set up and perform simulations of transmembrane receptors, ligands, and receptor-ligand complexes.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Choudhuri K, Wiseman D, Brown MH, Gould K, van der Merwe PA (2005) T-cell receptor triggering is critically dependent on the dimensions of its peptide-MHC ligand. Nature 436:578–582. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature03843
Milstein O, Tseng S-Y, Starr T, Llodra J, Nans A, Liu M, Wild MK, van der Merwe PA, Stokes DL, Reisner Y, Dustin ML (2008) Nanoscale increases in CD2-CD48-mediated intermembrane spacing decrease adhesion and reorganize the immunological synapse. J Biol Chem 283:34414–34422
Chang VT, Fernandes RA, Ganzinger KA, Lee SF, Siebold C, McColl J, Jonsson P, Palayret M, Harlos K, Coles CH, Jones EY, Lui Y, Huang E, Gilbert RJC, Klenerman D, Aricescu AR, Davis SJ (2016) Initiation of T cell signaling by CD45 segregation at ‘close contacts’. Nat Immunol 17(5):574–582. https://doi.org/10.1038/ni.3392
Choudhuri K, Dustin ML (2010) Signaling microdomains in T cells. FEBS Lett 584:4823–4831
Wang R, Natarajan K, Margulies DH (2009) Structural basis of the CD8αβ/MHC class I interaction: focused recognition orients CD8β to a T cell proximal position. J Immunol 183(4):2554–2564. https://doi.org/10.4049/jimmunol.0901276
Pandey PR, Różycki B, Lipowsky R, Weikl TR (2021) Structural variability and concerted motions of the T cell receptor – CD3 complex. elife 10:67195. https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.67195.sa2
Davis SJ, van der Merwe PA (2006) The kinetic-segregation model: TCR triggering and beyond. Nat Immunol 7:803–809. https://doi.org/10.1038/ni1369
Bachmann MF, Barner M, Kopf M (1999) CD2 sets quantitative thresholds in T cell activation. J Exp Med 190(10):1383–1392. https://doi.org/10.1084/jem.190.10.1383
Różycki B, Weikl TR (2021) Cooperative stabilization of close-contact zones leads to sensitivity and selectivity in T-cell recognition. Cell 10(5):1023. https://doi.org/10.3390/cells10051023
Schmid EM, Bakalar MH, Choudhuri K, Weichsel J, Ann HS, Geissler PL, Dustin ML, Fletcher DA (2016) Size-dependent protein segregation at membrane interfaces. Nat Phys 12(7):704
Case DA, Aktulga HM, Belfon K, Ben-Shalom IY, Berryman JT, Brozell SR, Cerutti DS, Cheatham TE III, Cisneros GA, Cruzeiro VWD, Darden TA, Duke RE, Giambasu G, Gilson MK, Gohlke H, Goetz AW, Harris R, Izadi S, Izmailov SA, Kasavajhala K, Kaymak MC, King E, Kovalenko A, Kurtzman T, Lee TS, LeGrand S, Li P, Lin C, Liu J, Luchko T, Luo R, Machado M, Man V, Manathunga M, Merz KM, Miao Y, Mikhailovskii O, Monard G, Nguyen H, O’Hearn KA, Onufriev A, Pan F, Pantano S, Qi R, Rahnamoun A, Roe DR, Roitberg A, Sagui C, Schott-Verdugo S, Shajan A, Shen J, Simmerling CL, Skrynnikov NR, Smith J, Swails J, Walker RC, Wang J, Wang J, Wei H, Wolf RM, Wu X, Xiong Y, Xue Y, York DM, Zhao S, Kollman PA (2022) Amber 2022. University of California, San Francisco
Brooks BR, Brooks CL III, Mackerell AD Jr, Nilsson L, Petrella RJ, Roux B, Won Y, Archontis G, Bartels C, Boresch S, Caflisch A, Caves L, Cui Q, Dinner AR, Feig M, Fischer S, Gao J, Hodoscek M, Im W, Kuczera K, Lazaridis T, Ma J, Ovchinnikov V, Paci E, Pastor RW, Post CB, Pu JZ, Schaefer M, Tidor B, Venable RM, Woodcock HL, Wu X, Yang W, York DM, Karplus M (2009) Charmm: the biomolecular simulation program. J Comput Chem 30(10):1545–1614. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/jcc.21287. https://doi.org/10.1002/jcc.21287
Abraham MJ, Murtola T, Schulz R, Pall S, Smith JC, Hess B, Lindahl E (2015) Gromacs: High performance molecular simulations through multi-level parallelism from laptops to supercomputers. SoftwareX 1–2:19–25. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.softx.2015.06.001
Phillips JC, Braun R, Wang W, Gumbart J, Tajkhorshid E, Villa E, Chipot C, Skeel RD, Kale L, Schulten K (2005) Scalable molecular dynamics with NAMD. J Comput Chem 26(16):1781–1802. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/jcc.20289. https://doi.org/10.1002/jcc.20289
Eastman P, Friedrichs MS, Chodera JD, Radmer RJ, Bruns CM, Ku JP, Beauchamp KA, Lane TJ, Wang L-P, Shukla D, Tye T, Houston M, Stich T, Klein C, Shirts MR, Pande VS (2013) OpenMM 4: a reusable, extensible, hardware independent library for high performance molecular simulation. J Chem Theory Comput 9(1):461–469. https://doi.org/10.1021/ct300857j. PMID: 23316124
Kutzner C, Pall S, Fechner M, Esztermann A, de Groot BL, Grubmuller H (2019) More bang for your buck: improved use of gpu nodes for gromacs 2018. J Comput Chem 40(27):2418–2431. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/jcc.26011. https://doi.org/10.1002/jcc.26011
Eastman P, Swails J, Chodera JD, McGibbon RT, Zhao Y, Beauchamp KA, Wang L-P, Simmonett AC, Harrigan MP, Stern CD, Wiewiora RP, Brooks BR, Pande VS (2017) OpenMM 7: rapid development of high performance algorithms for molecular dynamics. PLoS Comput Biol 13(7):1–17. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1005659
Robustelli P, Piana S, Shaw DE (2018) Developing a molecular dynamics force field for both folded and disordered protein states. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A 115(21):4758–4766. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1800690115
Souza PCT, Alessandri R, Barnoud J, Thallmair S, Faustino I, Grunewald F, Patmanidis I, Abdizadeh H, Bruininks BMH, Wassenaar TA, Kroon PC, Melcr J, Nieto V, Corradi V, Khan HM, Domanski J, Javanainen M, Martinez-Seara H, Reuter N, Best RB, Vattulainen I, Monticelli L, Periole X, Tieleman DP, de Vries AH, Marrink SJ (2021) Martini 3: a general purpose force field for coarse-grained molecular dynamics. Nat Methods 18(4):382–388. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41592-021-01098-3
Jumper J, Evans R, Pritzel A, Green T, Figurnov M, Ronneberger O, Tunyasuvunakool K, Bates R, Žídek A, Potapenko A, Bridgland A, Meyer C, Kohl SAA, Ballard AJ, Cowie A, Romera-Paredes B, Nikolov S, Jain R, Adler J, Back T, Petersen S, Reiman D, Clancy E, Zielinski M, Steinegger M, Pacholska M, Berghammer T, Bodenstein S, Silver D, Vinyals O, Senior AW, Kavukcuoglu K, Kohli P, Hassabis D (2021) Highly accurate protein structure prediction with AlphaFold. Nature 596(7873):583–589. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-021-03819-2
Zheng W, Zhang C, Li Y, Pearce R, Bell EW, Zhang Y (2021) Folding nonhomologous proteins by coupling deep-learning contact maps with I-TASSER assembly simulations. Cell Rep Methods 1(3):100014. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.crmeth.2021.100014
Hopf TA, Colwell LJ, Sheridan R, Rost B, Sander C, Marks DS (2012) Three-dimensional structures of membrane proteins from genomic sequencing. Cell 149(7):1607–1621. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2012.04.012
Dong D, Zheng L, Lin J, Zhang B, Zhu Y, Li N, Xie S, Wang Y, Gao N, Huang Z (2019) Structural basis of assembly of the human T cell receptor-CD3 complex. Nature 573(7775):546. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-019-1537-0
Susac L, Vuong MT, Thomas C, von Bulow S, O’Brien-Ball C, Santos AM, Fernandes RA, Hummer G, Tampe R, Davis SJ (2022) Structure of a fully assembled tumor-specific T cell receptor ligated by pMHC. Cell 185(17):3201–321319. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2022.07.010
Haselwandter CA, Guo YR, Fu Z, MacKinnon R (2022) Elastic properties and shape of the piezo dome underlying its mechanosensory function. Proc Natl Acad Sci 119(40):10–10732208034119. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2208034119
Weikl TR (2022) A protein curvature for sensing touch. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A 119:2214536119
Fiser A, Do RKG, Šali A (2000) Modeling of loops in protein structures. Protein Sci 9(9):1753–1773. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1110/ps.9.9.1753. https://doi.org/10.1110/ps.9.9.1753
Søndergaard CR, Olsson MHM, Rostkowski M, Jensen JH (2011) Improved treatment of ligands and coupling effects in empirical calculation and rationalization of pKa values. J Chem Theory Comput 7(7):2284–2295. https://doi.org/10.1021/ct200133y
Anandakrishnan R, Aguilar B, Onufriev AV (2012) H++ 3.0: automating pK prediction and the preparation of biomolecular structures for atomistic molecular modeling and simulations. Nucleic Acids Res 40(Web Server issue):537–541. https://doi.org/10.1093/nar/gks375
Jo S, Kim T, Iyer VG, Im W (2008) CHARMM-GUI: a web-based graphical user interface for CHARMM. J Comput Chem 29(11):1859–1865. https://doi.org/10.1002/jcc.20945
Lee J, Cheng X, Swails JM, Yeom MS, Eastman PK, Lemkul JA, Wei S, Buckner J, Jeong JC, Qi Y, Jo S, Pande VS, Case DA, Brooks CL, MacKerell AD, Klauda JB, Im W (2016) CHARMM-GUI input generator for NAMD, GROMACS, AMBER, OpenMM, and CHARMM/OpenMM simulations using the CHARMM36 additive force field. J Chem Theory Comput 12(1):405–413. https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.jctc.5b00935. PMID: 26631602
Lomize MA, Lomize AL, Pogozheva ID, Mosberg HI (2006) OPM: orientations of proteins in membranes database. Bioinformatics 22(5):623–625. https://academic.oup.com/bioinformatics/articlepdf/22/5/623/537412/btk023.pdf. https://doi.org/10.1093/bioinformatics/btk023
Jo S, Kim T, Im W (2007) Automated builder and database of protein/membrane complexes for molecular dynamics simulations. PLoS One 2(9):1–9. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0000880
Hopkins CW, Le Grand S, Walker RC, Roitberg AE (2015) Long-time-step molecular dynamics through hydrogen mass repartitioning. J Chem Theory Comput 11(4):1864–1874. https://doi.org/10.1021/ct5010406
Salomon-Ferrer R, Goetz AW, Poole D, Le Grand S, Walker RC (2013) Routine microsecond molecular dynamics simulations with AMBER on GPUs. 2. Explicit solvent particle mesh Ewald. J Chem Theory Comput 9(9):3878–3888. https://doi.org/10.1021/ct400314y
Plattner N, Doerr S, De Fabritiis G, Noe F (2017) Complete protein-protein association kinetics in atomic detail revealed by molecular dynamics simulations and Markov modelling. Nat Chem 9(10):1005–1011
Chakrabarti KS, Olsson S, Pratihar S, Giller K, Overkamp K, Lee KO, Gapsys V, Ryu K-S, de Groot BL, Noe F, Becker S, Lee D, Weikl TR, Griesinger C (2022) A litmus test for classifying recognition mechanisms of transiently binding proteins. Nat Commun 13(1):3792. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-022-31374-5
Hu J, Lipowsky R, Weikl TR (2013) Binding constants of membrane-anchored receptors and ligands depend strongly on the nanoscale roughness of membranes. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A 110(38):15283–15288
Hu J, Xu G-K, Lipowsky R, Weikl TR (2015) Binding kinetics of membrane-anchored receptors and ligands: molecular dynamics simulations and theory. J Chem Phys 143:243137
Xu G-K, Hu J, Lipowsky R, Weikl TR (2015) Binding constants of membrane-anchored receptors and ligands: a general theory corroborated Monte Carlo simulations. J Chem Phys 143:243136
Steinkuhler J, Rozycki B, Alvey C, Lipowsky R, Weikl TR, Dimova R, Discher DE (2019) Membrane fluctuations and acidosis regulate cooperative binding of ‘marker of self’ protein CD47 with the macrophage checkpoint receptor SIRPα. J Cell Sci 132:216770
Phillips JC, Hardy DJ, Maia JDC, Stone JE, Ribeiro JV, Bernardi RC, Buch R, Fiorin G, Henin J, Jiang W, McGreevy R, Melo MCR, Radak BK, Skeel RD, Singharoy A, Wang Y, Roux B, Aksimentiev A, Luthey-Schulten Z, Kale LV, Schulten K, Chipot C, Tajkhorshid E (2020) Scalable molecular dynamics on CPU and GPU architectures with NAMD. J Chem Phys 153(4):044130. https://doi.org/10.1063/5.0014475
Kim YC, Hummer G (2008) Coarse-grained models for simulations of multiprotein complexes: application to ubiquitin binding. J Mol Biol 375(5):1416–1433
Acknowledgments
B.R. acknowledges the supported from the National Science Center of Poland via grant no 2021/40/Q/NZ1/00017.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2023 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature
About this protocol
Cite this protocol
Pandey, P.R., Rózycki, B., Weikl, T.R. (2023). Molecular Dynamics Simulations of Immune Receptors and Ligands. In: Baldari, C.T., Dustin, M.L. (eds) The Immune Synapse. Methods in Molecular Biology, vol 2654. Humana, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-0716-3135-5_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-0716-3135-5_4
Published:
Publisher Name: Humana, New York, NY
Print ISBN: 978-1-0716-3134-8
Online ISBN: 978-1-0716-3135-5
eBook Packages: Springer Protocols