Re-charging your fats: Charmm36 parameters for neutral lipids triacylglycerol and diacylglycerol

Abstract

Neutral lipids (NLs) are an abundant class of cellular lipids. They are characterized by the total lack of charged chemical groups in their structure, and, as a consequence, they play a major role in intracellular lipid storage. NLs that carry a glycerol backbone, such as triacylglycerols (TGs) and diacylglycerols (DGs), are also involved in the biosynthetic pathway of cellular phospholipids, and they have recently been the subject of numerous structural investigations by means of atomistic molecular dynamics (MD) simulations. However, conflicting results on the physicochemical behavior of NLs were observed depending on the nature of the atomistic force field used. Here, we show that current phospholipid-derived CHARMM36 parameters for DGs and TGs cannot reproduce adequately interfacial properties of these NLs, due to excessive hydrophilicity at the glycerol-ester region. By following a CHARMM36-consistent parameterization strategy, we develop new parameters for both TGs and DGs that are compatible with both cutoffbased and Particle Mesh Ewald (PME) schemes for the treatment of Lennard Jones interactions. We show that our new parameters can reproduce interfacial properties of NLs and their behavior in more complex lipid assemblies. We discuss the implications of our findings in the context of intracellular lipid storage and NLs cellular activity.