A potassium ion channel simulated with a universal neural network potential

Abstract

Potassium ion channels are critical components of biology. They conduct potassium ions across the cell membrane with remarkable speed and selectivity. Understanding how they do this is crucially important for applications in neuroscience, medicine, and materials science. However, many fundamental questions about the mechanism they use remain unresolved, partly because it is extremely difficult to computationally model due to the scale and complexity of the necessary simulations. Here, the selectivity filter (SF) of the KcsA potassium ion channel is simulated using Orb-D3, a recently released universal neural network potential. A previously unreported hydrogen bond between water in the SF and the T75 hydroxyl side group at the entrance to the SF is observed. This hydrogen bond appears to stabilize water in the SF, enabling a soft knock-on transport mechanism where water is co-transported through the SF with a reasonable conductivity (80 $\pm$ 20 pS). Carbonyl backbone flipping is also observed at new sites in the SF. This work demonstrates the potential of universal neural network potentials to provide insights into previously intractable questions about complex systems far outside their training data distribution.