2024-04-10 FF Fitting Meeting

Participants

  • @Brent Westbrook (Unlicensed)

  • @David Mobley

  • @Chapin Cavender

  • @Jeffrey Wagner

  • @Alexandra McIsaac

  • @Pavan Behara

  • @Lily Wang

  • Andrea Bortolato

  • Chris Bayly

  • @Matt Thompson

Goals

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Discussion topics

Item

Presenter

Notes

Item

Presenter

Notes

Torsion multiplicity update

Brent Westbrook

 

Andrea Bortolato

  • (~14 min into recording)

  • What’s the direction of BespokeFit? Is there a way to compare the torsion in the molecule vs the torsion in the training set to recommend that torsions are re-parameterized, the same way Schrodinger does?

    • DM: we think that’s a good idea. We’ve not had the bandwidth to do that yet. We don’t think it should be very hard.

  • AB: I recall BF creates v specific torsions that will only apply to that molecule because it keeps appending. Is there a way to make it a bit more general? Would it be worth it to put a whole library through BF at once, if there’s infinite compute?

  • CB: the general OpenFF force fields have very few parameters, compared to other FFs. It suffers from being too general. In the extreme with unlimited compute, I would bespokefit every mol. In between these 2 extremes, is cheminformatics questions, and useful scenarios e.g. congeneric series. The scenario DM mentioned with steric clashes, is why I would go with bespokefit parameters every time. I would also prioritise better vdW parameters, which would lead to better general FF. The balance between generality and specificity depends on how much compute you have.

    • AB: it’d be nice to have a tool to decide this

    • DM: Roi/Psivant decided they’ll just custom-fit all torsions

    • CB: the decision between those two extremes boils down to a science decision, can you generalise these torsions. BF fragments molecules, so there should be common fragments and therefore torsions in a congeneric series

    • CB: can BespokeFit check previously created torsions to see if new common torsions already exist?

    • JW: yes, has to be same Executor. There may also be a way to stop it and start it back up. Can find answer either in docs or Josh Horton.

  • AB: wondering about Schrodinger approach for saturated ring pucker. Are you exploring reparameterizing this based on this?

    • LW: not immediately clear how we would deal with this so we haven’t looked at it specifically

  • CB: wrt our training and benchmark sets, could we take these saturated rings in our QCArchive between different ring conformers and look at ddE?

    • PB: we have in-ring torsions to tackle some of the heterocycle conformations

    • DM: when we generate conformers for rings, we do generate conformers

  • AB: is there a new type of ring that’s not in the training set, it may not be very accurate. Same idea as torsions

    • CB: SMARTS parameters tend to generalise well. Would expect SMIRNOFF ffs comparatively to be doing quite well. I’d worry about unsaturated rings more.

  • CB: do we have an easy tool to plot QM vs MM minima?

    • JW: no, should be straightforward script

    • CB: could these be a useful tool to decide whether I want to run bespokefit?

    • AB: the high-level question is can I predict how reliable this FF is for the system I’m interested in? At the end of the day my aim is not to get a general FF, it’s to get the best results possible with the time I have. I want to estimate the probability of error.

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Action items

Decisions