Automated Collective Variable Discovery for MFSD2A transporter from molecular dynamics simulations
Biomolecules often exhibit complex free energy landscapes in which long-lived metastable states are separated by large energy barriers. Overcoming these barriers to robustly sample transitions between the metastable states with classical molecular dynamics (MD) simulations presents a challenge. To circumvent this issue, collective variable (CV)-based enhanced sampling MD approaches are often employed. Traditional CV selection relies on intuition and prior knowledge of the system. This approach introduces bias, which can lead to incomplete mechanistic insights. Thus, automated CV detection is desired to gain a deeper understanding of the system/process. Analysis of MD data with various machine learning algorithms, such as Principal Component Analysis (PCA), Support Vector Machine (SVM), and Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA)-based approaches have been implemented for automated CV detection. However, their performance has not been systematically evaluated on structurally and mechanistica