An FFT-based method for modeling protein folding and binding under crowding: benchmarking on ellipsoidal and all-atom crowders.

It is now well recognized that macromolecular crowding can exert significant effects on protein folding and binding stability. In order to calculate such effects in direct simulations of proteins mixed with bystander macromolecules, the latter (referred to as crowders) are usually modeled as spheres and the proteins represented at a coarse-grained level. Our recently developed postprocessing approach allows the proteins to be represented at the all-atom level but, for computational efficiency, has only been implemented for spherical crowders. Modeling crowder molecules in cellular environments and in vitro experiments as spheres may distort their effects on protein stability. Here we present a new method that is capable for treating aspherical crowders. The idea, borrowed from protein-protein docking, is to calculate the excess chemical potential of the proteins in crowded solution by fast Fourier transform (FFT). As the first application, we studied the effects of ellipsoidal crowders on the folding and binding free energies of all-atom proteins, and found, in agreement with previous direct simulations with coarse-grained protein models, that the aspherical crowders exert greater stabilization effects than spherical crowders of the same volume. Moreover, as demonstrated here, the FFT-based method has the important property that its computational cost does not increase strongly even when the level of details in representing the crowders is increased all the way to all-atom, thus significantly accelerating realistic modeling of protein folding and binding in cell-like environments.