RT Journal Article SR Electronic T1 Kinetic Machine Learning Unravels Ligand-Directed Conformational Change of μ Opioid Receptor JF bioRxiv FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory SP 170886 DO 10.1101/170886 A1 Evan N. Feinberg A1 Amir B. Farimani A1 Carlos X. Hernandez A1 Vijay S. Pande YR 2017 UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/07/31/170886.abstract AB The μ Opioid Receptor (μOR) is a G-Protein Coupled Receptor (GPCR) that mediates pain and is a key target for clinically administered analgesics. The current generation of prescribed opiates – drugs that bind to μOR – engender dangerous side effects such as respiratory depression and addiction in part by stabilizing off-target conformations of the receptor. To determine both the key conformations of μOR to atomic resolution as well as the transitions between them, long timescale molecular dynamics (MD) simulations were conducted and analyzed. These simulations predict new and potentially druggable metastable states that have not been observed by crystallography. We applied cutting edge algorithms (e.g., tICA and Transfer Entropy) to guide our analysis and distill the key events and conformations from simulation, presenting a transferrable and systematic analysis scheme. Our approach provides a complete, predictive model of the dynamics, structure of states, and structure–ligand relationships of μOR with broad applicability to GPCR biophysics and medicinal chemistry.