Crystallographic data comes from a space-time average over all the unit cells
within the crystal, so dynamic phenomena do not contribute significantly to the
diffraction data. Many efforts have been made to reconstitute the movement of
the macromolecules and explore the microstates that the confined proteins can
adopt in the crystalline network. In this paper, we explored different
strategies to simulate a heart fatty acid binding proteins (H-FABP) crystal
starting from high resolution coordinates obtained at room temperature,
describing in detail the procedure to study protein crystals (in particular
H-FABP) by means of Molecular Dynamics simulations, and exploring the role of
ethanol as a co-solute that can modify the stability of the protein and
facilitate the interchange of fatty acids. Also, we introduced crystallographic
restraints in our crystal models, according to experimental isotropic B-factors
and analyzed the H-FABP crystal motions using Principal Component Analysis,
isotropic and anisotropic B-factors. Our results suggest that restrained MD
simulations based in experimental B-factors produce lower simulated B-factors
than simulations without restraints, leading to more accurate predictions of
the temperature factors. However, the systems without positional restraints
represent a higher microscopic heterogeneity in the crystal.