Development of a Coarse-Grained Model of Collagen-Like Peptide (CLP) for Studies of CLP Triple Helix Melting

In this paper, we present the development of a phenomenological coarse-grained model that represents single strands of collagen-like peptides (CLPs) as well as CLP triple helices. The goal of this model development is to enable coarse-grained molecular simulations of solutions of CLPs and conjugates of CLPs with other macromolecules and to predict trends in the CLP melting temperature with varying CLP design, namely CLP length and composition. Since the CLP triple helix is stabilized primarily by hydrogen bonds between amino acids in adjacent strands, for modeling CLP melting we get inspiration from a recent coarse-grained (CG) model that was used to capture specific and directional hydrogen-bonding interactions in base-pair hybridization within oligonucleotides and reproduced known DNA melting trends with DNA sequence and composition in implicit water. In this paper, we systematically describe the changes we make to this original CG model and then show that these improvements reproduce the known melting trends of CLPs seen in past experiments. Specifically, the CG simulations of CLP solutions at experimentally relevant concentrations show increasing melting temperature with increasing CLP length and decreasing melting temperature with incorporation of charged residues in place of uncharged residues in the CLP, in agreement with past experimental observations. Finally, results from simulations of CLP triple helices conjugated with elastin like peptides (ELPs), using this new CG model of CLP, reproduce the same trends in ELP aggregation as seen in past experiments.