Predictive all-atom simulations of disordered proteins and biomolecular condensates through osmometry-guided force-field optimization

All-atom simulations with explicit solvent provide the most detailed and accurate description of dynamics and mechanisms in intrinsically disordered proteins and their condensates. However, interactions involving charged residues and ions remain a persistent source of systematic error. Here we introduce an osmometry-guided optimization strategy that directly targets residue–residue, residue–ion and ion–ion interactions. Osmotic pressure provides key experimental information on molecular interactions and can be calculated directly and rapidly from simulations, enabling efficient iterative force-field optimization. The resulting parameters improve agreement of all-atom simulations with a range of experimental data: single-molecule FRET measurements for 16 monomeric intrinsically disordered regions; NMR relaxation data for a complex between an IDP and a folded protein domain; and mean FRET efficiencies and chain reconfiguration times of IDPs in biomolecular condensates of highly charged proteins. For such condensates, simulations with an osmometry-calibrated force field provide the missing link for predicting condensate dynamics across length and time scales. The presented optimization strategy is broadly extensible to other interaction classes, including those governing protein–DNA and protein–RNA assemblies.