Warning: file_get_contents(https://eutils.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/eutils/elink.fcgi?dbfrom=pubmed&id=25808134
&cmd=llinks): Failed to open stream: HTTP request failed! HTTP/1.1 429 Too Many Requests
in C:\Inetpub\vhosts\kidney.de\httpdocs\pget.php on line 215
Guidelines for the analysis of free energy calculations
#MMPMID25808134
Klimovich PV
; Shirts MR
; Mobley DL
J Comput Aided Mol Des
2015[May]; 29
(5
): 397-411
PMID25808134
show ga
Free energy calculations based on molecular dynamics simulations show
considerable promise for applications ranging from drug discovery to prediction
of physical properties and structure-function studies. But these calculations are
still difficult and tedious to analyze, and best practices for analysis are not
well defined or propagated. Essentially, each group analyzing these calculations
needs to decide how to conduct the analysis and, usually, develop its own
analysis tools. Here, we review and recommend best practices for analysis
yielding reliable free energies from molecular simulations. Additionally, we
provide a Python tool, alchemical-analysis.py, freely available on GitHub as part
of the pymbar package (located at http://github.com/choderalab/pymbar), that
implements the analysis practices reviewed here for several reference simulation
packages, which can be adapted to handle data from other packages. Both this
review and the tool covers analysis of alchemical calculations generally,
including free energy estimates via both thermodynamic integration and free
energy perturbation-based estimators. Our Python tool also handles output from
multiple types of free energy calculations, including expanded ensemble and
Hamiltonian replica exchange, as well as standard fixed ensemble calculations. We
also survey a range of statistical and graphical ways of assessing the quality of
the data and free energy estimates, and provide prototypes of these in our tool.
We hope this tool and discussion will serve as a foundation for more
standardization of and agreement on best practices for analysis of free energy
calculations.