Markov state models are to date the gold standard for modeling molecular kinetics since they enable the identification and analysis of metastable states and related kinetics in a very instructive manner. The state-of-the-art Markov state modeling methods and tools are very well developed for the modeling of reversible processes in closed equilibrium systems. On the contrary, they are largely not well suited to deal with nonreversible or even nonautonomous processes of nonequilibrium systems. Thus, we generalized the common Robust Perron Cluster Cluster Analysis (PCCA+) method to enable straightforward modeling of nonequilibrium systems as well. The resulting Generalized PCCA (G-PCCA) method readily handles equilibrium as well as nonequilibrium data by utilizing real Schur vectors instead of eigenvectors. This is implemented in the G-PCCA algorithm that enables the semiautomatic coarse graining of molecular kinetics. G-PCCA is not limited to the detection of metastable states but also enables the identification and modeling of cyclic processes. This is demonstrated by three typical examples of nonreversible systems.

The docking program PLANTS, which is based on ant colony optimization (ACO) algorithm, has many advanced features for molecular docking. Among them are multiple scoring functions, the possibility to model explicit displaceable water molecules, and the inclusion of experimental constraints. Here, we add support of PLANTS to VirtualFlow (VirtualFlow Ants), which adds a valuable method for primary virtual screenings and rescoring procedures. Furthermore, we have added support of ligand libraries in the MOL2 format, as well as on the fly conversion of ligand libraries which are in the PDBQT format to the MOL2 format to endow VirtualFlow Ants with an increased flexibility regarding the ligand libraries. The on the fly conversion is carried out with Open Babel and the program SPORES. We applied VirtualFlow Ants to a test system involving KEAP1 on the Google Cloud up to 128,000 CPUs, and the observed scaling behavior is approximately linear. Furthermore, we have adjusted several central docking parameters of PLANTS (such as the speed parameter or the number of ants) and screened 10 million compounds for each of the 10 resulting docking scenarios. We analyzed their docking scores and average docking times, which are key factors in virtual screenings. The possibility of carrying out ultra-large virtual screening with PLANTS via VirtualFlow Ants opens new avenues in computational drug discovery.

We consider a stochastic optimal exit time feedback control problem. The Bellman equation is solved approximatively via the Policy Iteration algorithm on a polynomial ansatz space by a sequence of ...

Molecular dynamics (MD) simulations face challenging problems since the time scales of interest often are much longer than what is possible to simulate; and even if sufficiently long simulations are possible the complex nature of the resulting simulation data makes interpretation difficult. Markov State Models (MSMs) help to overcome these problems by making experimentally relevant time scales accessible via coarse grained representations that also allow for convenient interpretation. However, standard set-based MSMs exhibit some caveats limiting their approximation quality and statistical significance. One of the main caveats results from the fact that typical MD trajectories repeatedly re-cross the boundary between the sets used to build the MSM which causes statistical bias in estimating the transition probabilities between these sets. In this article, we present a set-free approach to MSM building utilizing smooth overlapping ansatz functions instead of sets and an adaptive refinement approach. This kind of meshless discretization helps to overcome the recrossing problem and yields an adaptive refinement procedure that allows us to improve the quality of the model while exploring state space and inserting new ansatz functions into the MSM.