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Deep learning study of tyrosine reveals that roaming can lead to photodamage

Abstract

Amino acids are among the building blocks of life, forming peptides and proteins, and have been carefully ‘selected’ to prevent harmful reactions caused by light. To prevent photodamage, molecules relax from electronic excited states to the ground state faster than the harmful reactions can occur; however, such photochemistry is not fully understood, in part because theoretical simulations of such systems are extremely expensive—with only smaller chromophores accessible. Here, we study the excited-state dynamics of tyrosine using a method based on deep neural networks that leverages the physics underlying quantum chemical data and combines different levels of theory. We reveal unconventional and dynamically controlled ‘roaming’ dynamics in excited tyrosine that are beyond chemical intuition and compete with other ultrafast deactivation mechanisms. Our findings suggest that the roaming atoms are radicals that can lead to photodamage, offering a new perspective on the photostability and photodamage of biological systems.

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Fig. 1: Roaming hydrogen atoms in tyrosine discovered during a photodynamics simulation.
Fig. 2: Photoproducts of tyrosine observed in ‘non-roaming’ and ‘roaming’ trajectories.
Fig. 3: Kinetic analysis of photodissociation in tyrosine.

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Data availability

The molecular coordinates of the conformers used in this study that are shown in Supplementary Fig. 1 and Supplementary Fig. 9 are available in the Supplementary Information. Additionally, the dataset is made available at https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.15132081 (ref. 66) in the Atomic Simulation Environment (ase)67 database format including the initial conditions (geometries and velocities) to set up the dynamics. A detailed description of the ML models, training set generation, training procedure, dynamics simulations and analysis is provided in the Supplementary Information. For reproduction of this work, replace the example dataset provided in the tutorial with the provided dataset and set the necessary parameters indicated in the Supplementary Information and listed in the tutorial instructions. For dynamics, set up the trajectories with SHARC68 using the initial conditions file available at https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.15132081 (ref. 66) and follow the tutorial on how to run dynamics with SchNarc. Source data are provided with this paper.

Code availability

The ML code used in this work is available at https://github.com/schnarc/schnarc (ref. 25) and included as a supplementary code. The development branch includes a tutorial for training SchNarc models and running dynamics with it.

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Acknowledgements

This work was financially supported by the Austrian Science Fund (W 1232 (MolTag doctoral program “Ion channels and transporters as molecular drug targets”) and J 4522-N (J.W.)) and the uni:docs programme of the University of Vienna (J.W.). The computational results presented have been achieved in part using the Vienna Scientific Cluster. P.M. and L.G. thank the University of Vienna for continuous support, and also support in the frame of the research platform ViRAPID (Vienna Research Platform on Accelerating Photoreaction Discovery). J.W. and P.M. are grateful for an Nvidia Hardware Grant. M.G. works at the BASLEARN Joint Lab for Machine Learning, cofinanced by the Technische Universität Berlin and BASF SE.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Contributions

P.M. and L.G. proposed the project and supervised it. J.W. and P.M. implemented and designed the methods. M.G. and D.V. helped with fitting the neural networks. D.V., L.P. and F.J. contributed to the reference calculations and the training set generation, that is, the generation of adjusted data points. J.W. performed the model training, data acquisition and model analysis. J.W. and P.M. interpreted the data, designed the analysis and wrote the initial manuscript. L.G., P.M., J.W. and M.G. revised the manuscript. All authors proofread the final manuscript and the Supplementary Information.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Philipp Marquetand.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

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Nature Chemistry thanks Joel Bowman and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Extended data

Extended Data Fig. 1 Validation of our method to combine ADC(2) and CASPT2, the generation of ad hoc data, and their influence on neural network training.

(a) Potential energy curves along the PhO-H bond using CASSCF(12,11) (left panel, solid lines), CASPT2(12,11) (left panel, dotted lines), and ADC(2) (right panel). (b) Absorption spectra of tyrosine computed with ADC(2), TD-DFT/PBE0/SV(P), CASSCF(12,11), and CASPT(12,11) spectra using 1000 Wigner-sampled conformations. For CASPT2(12,11) and CASSCF(12,11) 758 calculations converged. The full width at half maximum for the Gaussian convolution was 0.2 eV in ADC(2) and TD-DFT spectra and 0.5 eV in CASPT2(12,11) and CASSCF(12,11) spectra and absorption peaks are scaled such that the lowestenergy peak has the same height as the energetically lowest-lying experimental absorption peak that was extracted from ref. 46. (c) Spectrum obtained from ADC(2) redshifted by 0.3 eV with contributions from different excited states. (d) Tyrosine shown with circled hydrogen atoms that were detached to generate ad hoc data (Supplementary Table 3 and 4). (e) The Ph-OH and (f) the N-H bond as example reaction coordinates to show the differences of ADC(2) (solid and dashed lines), CASPT2(12,11) (circles), and MP2 calculations (crosses) that manifest the degeneracy of singlet and triplet states. Second plots illustrates the data used for training and the third and fourth plots show neural network predictions using a simple multi-layer feed-forward neural network (Supplementary section 7.A) faster trainable than SchNarc models that were trained without ad hoc data points and with ad hoc data points, respectively. S refers to singlet and T to triplet states.

Source data

Supplementary information

Supplementary Information

Supplementary Figs. 1–17, Tables 1–6 and Discussion.

Supplementary Video 1

Roaming atoms in tyrosine.

Supplementary Video 2

Recoiling atoms in tyrosine.

Supplementary Software 1

Code for SchNarc dynamics as available on github at https://github.com/schnarc/SchNarc/tree/develop.

Supplementary Data 1

The xyz structures of tyrosine conformers, roaming geometries and dissociation data points.

Supplementary Data 2

Source data for the Supplementary Information.

Source data

Source Data Fig. 1

Structures of the first trajectory, in which roaming atoms were observed.

Source Data Fig. 3

Analysis of dynamics simulations.

Source Data Extended Data Fig. 1

Potential energy curves and UV/visible absorption spectra to support the method validation and the generation of ad hoc data points.

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Westermayr, J., Gastegger, M., Vörös, D. et al. Deep learning study of tyrosine reveals that roaming can lead to photodamage. Nat. Chem. 14, 914–919 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41557-022-00950-z

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