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Main Authors: Dawson, William, Beal, Louis, Zaccaria, Marco, Genovese, Luigi
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.26411
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author Dawson, William
Beal, Louis
Zaccaria, Marco
Genovese, Luigi
author_facet Dawson, William
Beal, Louis
Zaccaria, Marco
Genovese, Luigi
contents Predicting how protein mutations affect drug binding remains a major challenge, particularly when the mutations are distal from the binding site. In this study, we introduce a coupled simulation workflow that combines long-time-scale molecular dynamics (MD) with high-throughput quantum mechanical (QM) analysis to reveal the electronic structure signatures of mutation induced drug resistance in the HIV-1 protease. Our workflow leverages GPU-accelerated MD to generate conformational ensembles, and performs in-operando linear-scaling density functional theory (DFT) calculations on selected frames parallelized on a coupled partition of CPU nodes. This design enables efficient, massively parallel quantum analysis of protein-ligand complexes at atomic resolution. Using this approach, we investigate resistance to the antiviral Darunavir in a multi-mutant HIV-1 protease variant. By mapping the network of electronic interactions across the binding interface, our results highlight the critical role of conformational sampling and quantum insight in understanding distal mutation effects, and demonstrate a scalable computational strategy for studying complex biophysical mechanisms of drug resistance. We argue that such kind of analysis may pave the way for designing inhibitors that maintain binding stability against systemic, mutation-induced destabilization.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_26411
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Coupling Quantum Mechanical Modeling and Molecular Dynamics on Heterogeneous Supercomputers for Studying Distal Mutation Effects on Drug Binding in HIV-1
Dawson, William
Beal, Louis
Zaccaria, Marco
Genovese, Luigi
Chemical Physics
Predicting how protein mutations affect drug binding remains a major challenge, particularly when the mutations are distal from the binding site. In this study, we introduce a coupled simulation workflow that combines long-time-scale molecular dynamics (MD) with high-throughput quantum mechanical (QM) analysis to reveal the electronic structure signatures of mutation induced drug resistance in the HIV-1 protease. Our workflow leverages GPU-accelerated MD to generate conformational ensembles, and performs in-operando linear-scaling density functional theory (DFT) calculations on selected frames parallelized on a coupled partition of CPU nodes. This design enables efficient, massively parallel quantum analysis of protein-ligand complexes at atomic resolution. Using this approach, we investigate resistance to the antiviral Darunavir in a multi-mutant HIV-1 protease variant. By mapping the network of electronic interactions across the binding interface, our results highlight the critical role of conformational sampling and quantum insight in understanding distal mutation effects, and demonstrate a scalable computational strategy for studying complex biophysical mechanisms of drug resistance. We argue that such kind of analysis may pave the way for designing inhibitors that maintain binding stability against systemic, mutation-induced destabilization.
title Coupling Quantum Mechanical Modeling and Molecular Dynamics on Heterogeneous Supercomputers for Studying Distal Mutation Effects on Drug Binding in HIV-1
topic Chemical Physics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.26411