Implicit solvent models fail to reproduce secondary structures of de novo designed peptides

We test a range of standard implicit solvent models and protein forcefields for a set of 5 experimentally characterized, designed α-helical peptides. 65 combinations of forcefield and implicit solvent models are evaluated in >800 µs of molecular dynamics simulations. The data show that implicit solvent models generally fail to reproduce the experimentally observed secondary structure content, and none performs well for all 5 peptides. The results show that these models are not usefully predictive.