Electro-steric opening of the CLC-2 chloride channel gate.

The widely expressed two-pore homodimeric inward rectifier CLC-2 chloride channel regulates transepithelial chloride transport, extracellular chloride homeostasis, and neuronal excitability. Each pore is independently gated at hyperpolarized voltages by a conserved pore glutamate. Presumably, exiting chloride ions push glutamate outwardly while external protonation stabilizes it. To understand the mechanism of mouse CLC-2 opening we used homology modelling-guided structure-function analysis. Structural modelling suggests that glutamate E213 interacts with tyrosine Y561 to close a pore. Accordingly, Y561A and E213D mutants are activated at less hyperpolarized voltages, re-opened at depolarized voltages, and fast and common gating components are reduced. The double mutant cycle analysis showed that E213 and Y561 are energetically coupled to alter CLC-2 gating. In agreement, the anomalous mole fraction behaviour of the voltage dependence, measured by the voltage to induce half-open probability, was strongly altered in these mutants. Finally, cytosolic acidification or high extracellular chloride concentration, conditions that have little or no effect on WT CLC-2, induced reopening of Y561 mutants at positive voltages presumably by the inward opening of E213. We concluded that the CLC-2 gate is formed by Y561-E213 and that outward permeant anions open the gate by electrostatic and steric interactions.

Systematic procedure to parametrize force fields for molecular fluids.

A new strategy to develop force fields for molecular fluids is presented. The intermolecular parameters are fitted to reproduce experimental values of target properties at ambient conditions and also the critical temperature. The partial charges are chosen to match the dielectric constant. The Lennard-Jones parameters, εii and σii, are fitted to reproduce the surface tension at the vapor-liquid interface and the liquid density, respectively. The choice of those properties allows obtaining systematically the final parameters using a small number of simulations. It is shown that the use of surface tension as a target property is better than the choice of heat of vaporization. The method is applied to molecules, from all atoms to a coarse-grained level, such as pyridine, dichloromethane, methanol, and 1-ethyl-3-methylimidazolium tetrafluoroborate (EMIM-BF4) at different temperatures and pressures. The heat of vaporization, radial distribution functions, and self-diffusion coeficient are also calculated.

A new force field of formamide and the effect of the dielectric constant on miscibility.

Current force fields underestimate significantly the dielectric constant of formamide at standard conditions. We present a derivation of an accurate potential for formamide, with a functional form based on the OPLS/AA force field. Our procedure follows the approach introduced by Salas et al. ( J. Chem. Theory Comput. 2015 , 11 , 683 - 693 ) that relies on ab initio calculations and molecular dynamics simulations. We consider several strategies to derive the atomic charges of formamide. We find that the inclusion of polarization effects in the quantum mechanical computations is essential to obtain reliable force fields. By varying the atomic charges and the Lennard-Jones parameters describing the dispersion interactions in the OPLS/AA force field, we derive an optimum set of parameters that provides accurate results for the dielectric constant, surface tension, and bulk density of liquid formamide in a wide range of thermodynamic states. We test the transferability of our parameters to investigate liquid/liquid mixtures. We have chosen as case study an equimolar mixture of formamide and hexan-2-one. This mixture involves two fluids with very different polar characteristics, namely, large differences in their dielectric constants and their performance as solvents. The new potential predicts a liquid/liquid phase separation, in good agreement with experimental data, and highlights the importance of the correct parametrization of the pure liquid phases to investigate liquid mixtures. Finally, we examine the microscopic origin of the observed inmiscibility between formamide and hexa-2-one.

Fluid-solid coexistence from two-phase simulations: binary colloidal mixtures and square well systems.

Molecular dynamics simulations are performed to clarify the reasons for the disagreement found in a previous publication [G. A. Chapela, F. del Río, and J. Alejandre, J. Chem. Phys. 138(5), 054507 (2013)] regarding the metastability of liquid-vapor coexistence on equimolar charged binary mixtures of fluids interacting with a soft Yukawa potential with κσ = 6. The fluid-solid separation obtained with the two-phase simulation method is found to be in agreement with previous works based on free energy calculations [A. Fortini, A.-P. Hynninen, and M. Dijkstra, J. Chem. Phys. 125, 094502 (2006)] only when the CsCl structure of the solid is used. It is shown that when pressure is increased at constant temperature, the solids are amorphous having different structures, densities, and the diagonal components of the pressure tensor are not equal. A stable low density fluid-solid phase separation is not observed for temperatures above the liquid-vapor critical point. In addition, Monte Carlo and discontinuous molecular dynamics simulations are performed on the square well model of range 1.15σ. A stable fluid-solid transition is observed above the vapor-liquid critical temperature only when the solid has a face centered cubic crystalline structure.