MSMBuilder2: Modeling conformational dynamics on the picosecond to millisecond scale

Markov state models provide a framework for understanding the fundamental states and rates in the conformational dynamics of biomolecules. We describe an improved protocol for constructing Markov state models from molecular dynamics simulations. The new protocol includes advances in clustering, data preparation, and model estimation; these improvements lead to significant increases in model accuracy, as assessed by the ability to recapitulate equilibrium and kinetic properties of reference systems. A high-performance implementation of this protocol, provided in MSMBuilder2, is validated on dynamics ranging from picoseconds to milliseconds.