Case Report: Bayesian Statistical Inference of Experimental Parameters via Biomolecular Simulations: Atomic Force Microscopy

Abstract

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The atomic force microscopy (AFM) is a powerful tool for imaging structures of molecules bound on surfaces. To gain high-resolution structural information, one often superimposes structure models on the measured images. Motivated by high flexibility of biomolecules, we previously developed a flexible-fitting molecular dynamics (MD) method that allows protein structural changes upon superimposing. Since the AFM image largely depends on the AFM probe tip geometry, the fitting process requires accurate estimation of the parameters related to the tip geometry. Here, we performed a Bayesian statistical inference to estimate a tip radius of the AFM probe from a given AFM image via flexible-fitting molecular dynamics (MD) simulations. We first sampled conformations of the nucleosome that fit well the reference AFM image by the flexible-fitting with various tip radii. We then estimated an optimal tip parameter by maximizing the conditional probability density of the AFM image produced from the fitted structure.

Keywords

• atomic force microscopy
• probe tip
• flexible-fitting
• coarse-grained molecular simulation
• CafeMol