Quantum Approximated Graph Cutting: A Rapid Replacement for T-REMD?

Determining an optimal protein configuration for the employment of protein binding analysis as completed by Temperature based Replica Exchange Molecular Dynamics (T-REMD) is an important process in the accurate depiction of a protein’s behavior in different solvent environments, especially when determining a protein’s top binding sites for use in protein-ligand and protein-protein docking studies. However, the completion of this analysis, which pushes out top binding sites through configurational changes, is an polynomial-state computational problem that can take multiple hours to compute, even on the fastest supercomputers. In this study, we aim to determine if graph cutting provide approximated solutions the MaxCut problem can be used as a method to provide similar results to T-REMD in the determination of top binding sites of Surfactant Protein A (SP-A) for binding analysis. Additionally, we utilize a quantum-hybrid algorithm within Iff Technology’s Polar+ package using an actual quantum processor unit (QPU), an implementation of Polar+ using an emulated QPU, or Quantum Abstract Machine (QAM), on a large scale classical computing device, and an implementation of a classical MaxCut algorithm on a supercomputer in order to determine the types of advantages that can be gained through using a quantum computing device for this problem, or even using quantum algorithms on a classical device. This study found that Polar+ provides a dramatic speedup over a classical implementation of a MaxCut approximation algorithm or the use of GROMACS T-REMD, and produces viable results, in both its QPU and QAM implementations. However, the lack of direct configurational changes carried out onto the structure of SP-A after the use of graph cutting methods produces different final binding results than those produced by GROMACS T-REMD. Thus, further work needs to be completed into translating quantum-based probabilities into configurational changes based on a variety of noise conditions to better determine the accuracy advantage that quantum algorithms and quantum devices can provide in the near future.