Increasing the precision of comparative models with YASARA NOVA—a self‐parameterizing force field

One of the conclusions drawn at the CASP4 meeting in Asilomar was that applying various force fields during refinement of template-based models tends to move predictions in the wrong direction, away from the experimentally determined coordinates. We have derived an all-atom force field aimed at protein and nucleotide optimization in vacuo (NOVA), which has been specifically designed to avoid this problem. NOVA resembles common molecular dynamics force fields but has been automatically parameterized with two major goals: (i) not to make high resolution X-ray structures worse and (ii) to improve homology models built by WHAT IF. Force-field parameters were not required to be physically correct; instead, they…