2024-10-10 Force Field Release Meeting notes

 Date

Oct 10, 2024

 Participants

  1. @Lily Wang

  2. @Alexandra McIsaac

  3. @Brent Westbrook (Unlicensed)

  4. @David Mobley

  5. Chris Bayly

  6. @Chapin Cavender

  7. @Michael Shirts

  8. @Pavan Behara

  9. @Anika Friedman

Recording:

Video Conferencing, Web Conferencing, Webinars, Screen Sharing
Passcode: n#4^LCD?

 Discussion topics

Item

Presenter

Notes

Item

Presenter

Notes

NAGL1

 

 

LW

  • Plan to release NAGL 1

  • Industry benchmark HFEs (slide 3)

    • CB: This is just a correlation, it’s easy to get a correlation when you span such a large range.

    • CB: Would be useful to zoom in on non-zwitterion range, there are a few outliers off by 10-15 kcal/mol

    • CB: We should look into outliers and characterize functional groups present, is it behaving poorly for certain groups?

    • LW: Makes sense, I’ll do that

  • Diastereomer HFEs

    • CB: Openeye graph shows how close Diastereomer 1 vs Diastereomer 2, both from OE. Did you compare Diastereomer 1 (OE) vs Diastereomer 1 (NAGL)?

    • CB: What matters is how well NAGL vs OE gives HFE differences, since the difference isn’t just from the charges

    • CB: I was more wondering about comparing the same structure with different charge methods. Want NAGL to give same HFE for diastereomer 1 as AM1BCC does. E.g. how much of difference in HFE is due to difference in charge, vs other things

    • LW: Good point, I’ll look into that

    • LW: For specific molecules I have already looked into it, specifically those with large difference between Diastereomer 1 vs Diastereomer 2 [ slide 10-11]

      • MS: This is kind of problematic for NAGL, would expect it to give an average between the two diastereomers, but it’s different from both for some atoms

      • DM: Do you have Amber tools charges for these?

      • LW: no

      • CB: Looks like differences are ~1 kcal/mol, I’d consider that acceptable

  • DM: So your plan is to do a NAGL release soon-ish, and this would be a future research topic?

    • LW: Yes, want to benchmark stereoisomer problem, but it’s a whole research topic so don’t want it to block NAGL

    • CB: I think NAGL looks good, HFE’s look good

  • Similarity tool for identifying how close your molecule is to NAGL training data

  • Approach 1: molecule fingerprints

    • MS: What’s the use case?

    • LW: People want to see how similar their molecule is to the training set

    • MS: Would think the low end is more important than the high end

    • LW: It’s true, but also don’t want false positives, because people will think their molecule is well described and it isn’t

    • CB: As someone who would want this tool, if it comes back with a low similarity, I don’t care what the most similar molecule is since it’s not similar. If the similarity is high, I might be interested in seeing the most similar molecule, but would just generally take the metric as my info rather than the specific most similar molecule. From that perspective, it looked like the Morgan fingerprint was better

    • CB: In low similarity case, would you agree that the most similar molecule isn’t helpful? Would NAGL be using charges from that kind of molecule?

    • CB: Do you think this tool is useful?

      • LW: A bit skeptical of utility, for example if we use charge ESP to determine “similarity”, it has no correlation with fingerprint similarity, e.g. may be very similar molecule but only one so it’s not well defined, vs many very similar molecules in training data would be very well defined

      • CB: If you were a customer and wanted to have confidence in your molecule, is there something else you’d suggest?

      • LW: In ideal world, would like something trained to and correlates with molecule and benchmark results, like HFE or Charge RMSE, but haven’t been able to get good results, and hard to interpret

      • CB: Sounds like this might not be the easiest to use

      • DM: In a perfect world where we had a cheap way to measure accuracy of final charges, I’d hope that it wouldn’t matter how you measure similarity, that the conclusion would be the same. Is that not the case?

      • DM: Would you draw very different conclusions about how good the charges are depending on which similarity metric you’re using?

        • LW: Using the two fingerprint methods, no, the conclusion is basically the same

      • DM: Is there any way to look at charge goodness? Eg maybe pick a molecule where NAGL does poorly, and see if you can find a metric that identifies it. Can you break NAGL?

        • LW: Yes, existing set of very small mols NAGL doesn’t handle well, other areas where it isn’t trained on certain chemistries, but unfortunately they do show up as having high similarity

  • Approach 2: Fragment molecule before comparing to training set, since molecular size is a challenge

  • Approach 3: Could make up our own fingerprint--didn’t try (yet)

    • CB: HFE comparison between open eye and NAGL, choose similarity with fingerprint, and show error in free energy vs fingerprint similarity

    • MS: Agree it’s a prioritization question, eg there are no tools to check whether a molecule is treated well by AM1BCC

    • LW: Good suggestion, should be fast to code, and I suspect will show that no easy to compute/existing similarity metric will correlate with HFE

  • LW: I worry that after doing some finagling with HFE or customized similarity, it still won’t show anything useful. Do we want to invest time in that, or just give them the fingerprint tool?

    • MS: Would be nice, but many things would be nice…maybe just tell them to compare and calculate AM1BCC for comparison if the molecules are really different

    • DM: Giving users a similarity score that doesn’t really mean anything isn’t useful, Maybe we should just flag molecules containing functional groups we don't describe well.

    • CC: Alternative solution--lots of work, but I think it should be possible to get NN to spit out a confidence, may have to change architecture but could give users a confidence score

    • DM: May worry that uncertainty would be really wrong outside training set?

    • CC: Thinking of PLDTT (?) score from alpha fold

    • MS: What’s our prioritization?

      • LW: With NAGL1 very low priority, but something to think about for NAGL2 since we haven’t started training it

  • Release plan for NAGL? Want to release it soon, because it’s starting to block people’s workflows. Is there anything else you’d like to see before we release it?

    • MS, DM: No, let’s release it

    • CB: Will we also release FF that’s paramaterized for NAGL?

    • DM: First we just release it, in case people want it. Once we make NAGL the default charge model, we’d re-fit. Will be easier to re-fit if it’s released and integrated in our workflow

    • MS: NAGL is so close to OE charges, not sure we’d need to re-parameterize, people already use Amber Tools instead of OE which is more different. Would be very different from Library Charges, e.g. for proteins

  • PB: Would the pre-print be released with the NAGL release?

    • MS/LW: Let’s write it soon, will have more time soon

  • LW: Will move toward releasing NAGL as a full product in the next couple of weeks, together with infra team. Will prepare info for ad board regarding similarity tool.

Cofactors

CB

  • CB: how does OpenFF plan to handle metal cofactors?

    • DM: we’re not really set up with this. For example, how would OpenEye handle a haem?

    • CB: will come back with an answer to this

    • MS: would be nice to just take the parameters from somewhere so it could just go through

    • DM: we dabbled recently with ZAFF and it was painful

  • CB: How can I elevate this as a priority? Make a pitch at the ad board? Talk to the governing board?

    • DM: Question would be, what would you have us stop doing to work on this?

    • CB: In spirit of original OpenFF, don’t want anything fancy, but just very minimal

    • DM: My concern is that my group has done this recently with ZAFF and it was painful and didn’t really work, it seems to me that any “minimal” solution would be ~1 year of 1 science team member and ~1 year of 1 infra team member’s effort

    • CB: I see, that’s more effort than I anticipated. Maybe we can have another meeting where we brainstorm and see if there’s another approach that doesn’t require so much person time.

    • DM: Maybe you, I, and LW can talk further

    • LW: Maybe someone from DM group can give a short presentation about problems with ZAFF?

    • DM: Not sure it needs to be a formal presentation, but we can go into more detail offline.

  • CB: Problem with zinc is that the “billiard ball” approach leads to zinc unbinding from the protein

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 Action items

 Decisions