An extended sampling of the configurational space of HPr from E. coli.

Recently, we developed a method (Amadei et al., J. Biomol. Str. Dyn. 13: 615-626; de Groot et al., J. Biomol. Str. Dyn. 13: 741-751, 1996) to obtain an extended sampling of the configurational space of proteins, using an adapted form of molecular dynamics (MD) simulations, based on the essential dynamics (ED) (Amadei et al., Proteins 17:412-425, 1993) method. In the present study, this ED sampling technique is applied to the histidine-containing phosphocarrier protein HPr from Escherichia coli. We find a cluster of conformations that is an order of magnitude larger than that found for a usual MD simulation of comparable length. The structures in this cluster are geometrically and energetically comparable to NMR structures. Moreover, on average, this large cluster satisfies nearly all NMR-derived distance restraints.