2024-09-03 NAGL2 Discussion

 Date

Sep 3, 2024

 Participants

  • @Alexandra McIsaac

  • @David Mobley

  • Bill Swope

  • Julia Rice

  • Alberto Gobbi

 Discussion topics

Item

Presenter

Notes

Item

Presenter

Notes

Discussion of charge methods for NAGL 2

@Alexandra McIsaac

Recording

Video Conferencing, Web Conferencing, Webinars, Screen Sharing

Passcode: 8r5?Lxz=

Notes were also shared with external folks on Google Drive here

[I jotted the discussion points down during the meeting and fleshed out the discussion after--so it may not be in exactly the same order as the recording]

  • JR: How is ESP calculated in RESP? Are there grid points inside the molecule? What is the grid like?

    • LM: Don’t have specifics on grid, but definitely not inside the molecule

  • JR: Typically ESP is looking around 2-2.5 VDW radius–does that capture H bonding radius?

    • DM/LM: Not sure

  • AG: Regarding ELF10/conformer averaging for RESP, could in theory do Boltzmann weighting to favor low-E conformers

  • AG: Fitting RESP to dipole/quadrupole could alleviate buried atom problem

    • LM: We could try that, or add those as fitting targets for GNN but keep regular RESP

    • JR: GAMESS can fit RESP to dipole and quadrupole

  • AG: details of RESP vs MBIS ESP performance comparison? May not be looking at the same thing. RESP people have put a lot of thought into the grid.

    • LM: MBIS papers compare them using the same grid, but not sure whether they use the same grid as RESP is calculated on, or where the grid starts.

  • BS: Could MBIS be used to also parameterize the virtual sites?

    • DM: Don’t think so, not sure if using spherical densities would work for that

  • DM: Had a lab member who got HFEs similar to AM1BCC but without fitting anything, using MBIS

  • BS: IPolQ is still ESP-based, likely would have same buried atom problem

    • AG: Would fitting dipole at the same time help?

    • BS: Could I guess, havne't looked. Still think it would be an issue

  • DM: Maybe solvent model is even more important than the charge model?

    • JR: Implicit solvent doesn’t capture H bonding. I don’t like any implicit solvent models, too dependent on radius, not polarized enough

  • AG: Could we use dimer/interaction energies for validation? ANI paper A neural network potential with rigorous treatment of long-range dispersion

    • DM: What is the purpose of the interaction energy?

    • AG: Would include some polarization

  • AG: Is conformer dependence good or bad? If the ESP is conformer dependent, why should the charges not be? 

    • LM: The problem with RESP is when the charges shouldn’t be conformer dependent, e.g. trans vs cis butene. The ESP will change in space, so the charges may not be the same, even though they often should be. MBIS doesn’t have this problem, but if there is a meaningful difference in the conformer that would produce a charge difference, that would be reflected.

    • AG: There are situations where the conformer should affect the charge, and averaging over conformers or having fully conformer independent charges would neglect that.

  • DM: If we don’t want IPolQ, what’s next best option? 

    • BS: Could do nearest neighbor solvation shell around solute, could do QM optimization and get ESP from that

    • DM: Wouldn’t next nearest neighbor affect structure too much?

    • AG: What about implicit outside of first nearest neighbor

    • DM: We’ve tried to do that but it depended too much on specific number of explicit waters, where they went, etc, depends on everything

    • AG: maybe we don’t need full MD for IPolQ?

    • BS: Important thing for IPolQ is averaging over many solvent conformations. Maybe 100s of calcs 

    • DM: Flexible solute?

    • JR: No, solute fixed

    • JR: What about one water for molecules with H bonds?

    • LM: Would be concerned that that could have unpredictable effects

  • JR: are these the same charges as used for repulsive wall of LJ?

    • DM: electrostatics are the only part we can derive from QM, so do that first, then re-fit the rest (LJ, valence)

    • JR: Would need to think about 1-4 and 1-5 interactions

  • BS: Jorgenson uses CM1A, AM1BCC but for dipole/quadrupole, then scale up

  • AG: How do we define success?

    • LM: Typically assess solvation free energies (after LJ refit) and then if those are good move to ligand binding benchmarks

    • DM: First metric of success is how well final charge/ESP reproduce ground truth QM (first paper), then build FF and do LJ refit etc







 Action items

 Decisions