The free energy landscape for β hairpin folding in explicit water

The folding free energy landscape of the C-terminal β hairpin of protein G has been explored in this study with explicit solvent under periodic boundary condition and OPLSAA force field. A highly parallel replica exchange method that combines molecular dynamics trajectories with a temperature exchange Monte Carlo process is used for sampling with the help of a new efficient algorithm P3ME/RESPA. The simulation results show that the hydrophobic core and the β strand hydrogen bond form at roughly the same time. The free energy landscape with respect to various reaction coordinates is found to be rugged at low temperatures and becomes a smooth funnel-like landscape at about 360 K. In contrast to some very recent studies, no significant helical content has been found in our simulation at all temperatures studied. The β hairpin population and hydrogen-bond probability are in reasonable agreement with the experiment at biological temperature, but both decay more slowly than the experiment with temperature.