Sampling potential energy surface of glycyl glycine peptide: Comparison of metropolis Monte Carlo and stochastic dynamics

A comparative study was carried out to test the efficiency with which Metropolis Monte Carlo (MC) and stochastic dynamics (SD) sample the potential energy surface of the N-acetyl glycyl glycine methylamide peptide as defined by the united atom AMBER* force field. Boltzmann-weighted ensembles were generated with variations of all internal degrees of freedom (i.e., stretch, bend, and torsion) for a single N-acetyl glycyl glycine methylamide molecule at 300 K by 10⁸-step MC and 100-ns SD simulations. As expected, both methods gave the same final energetic results. However, convergence was found to be ∼10 times faster with MC than with SD as measured by comparisons of the populations of all symmetrically equivalent conformers.