2023-11-01 FF Fitting Meeting

Participants

  • @Alexandra McIsaac

  • Bill Swope

  • @David Mobley

  • @Christopher Bayly

  • @Brent Westbrook

  • @Chapin Cavender

Goals

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Discussion topics

Item

Presenter

Notes

Item

Presenter

Notes

Ring parameters

Lexie

Slides will be uploaded

  • CBy – which of the “specific” angles are exocyclic? Those are the critical ones, much more so than the internal angles – e.g. there’s not much an angle can be in a 3-membered ring other than 60°

    • AMI – …

    • CBy – can you compare what the angle you get for a parameter that you get from MM minimization compared to QM? I believe we will need specific angles for all exocyclic to a 3-membered ring, but the values of that would arise from this comparison

  • (on 4-membered rings slide)

    • CBy – I have a couple low-hanging fruit recommendations on these previous results you’ve presented. Can we just change the ordering so that a completely generic wildcard three-membered ring is 60 degrees period? It shouldn’t matter if it’s a C, N, O, in a 3-membered ring, should be 60 degrees. We shouldn’t need specific parameters in the ring for different elements. Now, with the 3-membered ring, what if we have two connected 3-membered rings – we can specify ring closure like [*:1]1-[*:2]-[*:3]1 (i.e. a3). Similar example for 4-membered rings.

    • AMI – (on whether we may need multiple parameters) e.g. a 4-membered ring with O in the middle of the angle has a much higher force constant, but that may not matter

    • CBy – doesn’t make sense to split out; we could probably group them together and have one good force constant.

  • DLM (in chat): I have a question about “four membered ring is around 90”; this is a function of pucker, right? So if the rings are more puckered we might see a larger angle…? Would be interested to know how flat those different rings are.

    • CBy – this should likely fall onto torsions to enforce pucker

    • DLM: I don’t know I’d want to enforce equilibrium angles to be equal just because the torsions would cover it

    • CBy – since AMI is pointing out dramatic problems, we would likely get most bang for buck with this (AMI’s) approach first

    • DLM: agree, this should be considered as a possible future approach, we should do the easy stuff first and then go from there

  • (on 5r angles – MSM vs Sage)

    • CBy: to clarify, is this only one atom in a ring, or at least one atom in a ring?

      • AMI: at least one atom in a ring

      • CBy: ok – so you would expect parameters with 1 vs 2 (vs 3+) to be substantially different?

      • AMI: yes

  • (on 5r angles slide)

    • DLM: what’s the peak near 90 in the equilibrium angle?

      • AMI: that’s the 4-membered rings being picked up by a1

  • AMI: raised parameter confusion of a18a: central atom is in a non-6-membered ring

    • LW: I went back and looked at this again, PB probably split it off because he saw differences with Ns in 6-membered rings

  • CBy (in chat): valence parameters of key interest: ringAtom-ringAtom-notRingAtom

    • CBy: are these distributions contained in the ones you’ve shown us already? They should be showing quite marked deviations

    • AMI: I don’t think I saw that in the distributions, but possibly the distributions are very broad so I didn’t see it

    • CBy: I think this would be very important for 3, 4, possibly 5-membered rings.

    • CBy: the force constant can be quite correlated to the angle, especially between a valence angle movement and bond stretching movement. So it may not matter so much for our ffs. But what does really matter are the equilibrium values for the exocyclic angles.

      • AMI: I’ll take a look at that

  • BSwope: found that relative energy of ring conformers was pretty messed up and apparently this is seen in a lot of cases, and possibly because force constants are too stiff and avoid interconversion

Parameter splitting

Brent

  • CBy: factor of 2 in objective function is concerning

  • DLM: I would want to ask Lee-Ping about that change in objective function

    • DLM: Also… what about going to the distribution plots for the ddEs rather than the histograms? It could be small differences in binning are exacerbating things here.

  • CBy: should we make the force constant dependent on the equilibrium value? Is that easy science? Although I care much more about equilibrium values than force constants and that’s where we would want to split parameters

    • DLM: it would be a significant infrastructure change to make this change

    • CBy: Paul Labute has made a force field around this dependence

  • DLM: suggests assigning unique values for each molecule and seeing performance difference to a general force field

    • CBy: would be interesting, also deconvolution between eq value and force constant

  • Trevor (in chat): If I was debugging the objective, I would determine if it was optgeo or torsion for a single target (i.e. look at the same target per version and see what the delta is). If it is optgeo, then I'd double check the denominators, and if it is torsion, I would double check the attentuation params

  • LW: that linear data you showed, Brent – was that MSM or espaloma data? Did espaloma give the same linear dependence?

    • BW: not seen in espaloma

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Action items

Decisions