2023-11-14 Conformer energy ordering meeting

Participants

  • @Alexandra McIsaac

  • Bill Swope

  • @Pavan Behara

  • @Lily Wang

Goals

  • Discuss status of the conformer energy ordering project (laid out here) and determine path forward

Discussion topics

Item

Presenter

Notes

Item

Presenter

Notes

Present introduction to project

Bill Swope

  • Presentation on work looking at conformer energy ordering issues in public dataset

  • Lee-Ping said that decision was made not to include ddE in FB targets, but it could take it

  • Current pipeline primarily looks at structures, not surprising that we have some issues with energies

Present progress so far

Pavan Behara

  • Slides

  • Weight targets based on QM and MM energy for Torsions

  • Use energy for optimized conformer geometry too

    • ddE target--good energies, but RMSD from QM high

    • RMSD as objective--good structures, bad energy order

    • Combine the two--gives ok energy order and structure

    • Restrained minimization works pretty well for both ddE and RMSD

    • Energy/force matching for opt geo targets

    • Relative energy of all pairs would be next step

    • Iterative fitting works in some cases--opt FF, generate MM minima, generate QM, add to training, opt FF again, repeat--works in some cases. Wouldn’t help if issue was due to non-bonded terms. May want to record outliers and check typing

  • Then repeat Bill’s analysis on new FF

Discussion of status/how to proceed

 

  • BS: Should think about what is the appropriate distance metric--is RMSD > 0.4 A too high? Should it be size-dependent

  • BS: Have you tried changing anything except valence (bonds, angles?)? Have you looked into whether it could be LJ, Charge, etc?

    • PB: No

  • LM: Any issue with parameter typing?

    • BS: Haven’t classified it that way but could be useful

    • PB: Could help but better to focus on targets, easy to get stuck on focusing on outliers

  • BS: How many cases where different conformers have different electronic structure? Would we need to look at a different fixed charge model? Our charge model may be favoring certain types of conformers

    • LW: S causes issues with AM1BCC, virtual sites might also help for S

  • LW: Hard to decouple bonded/non-bonded parameters, and expensive to refit non-bonded

  • BS: Using forces seems like it would help for matching DFT surface

    • PB: Agrees. Also, we’re not fitting vibrational frequencies--may need to think about that

    • LW: Why no vibrational frequencies?

    • PB: Fit was good without it

    • BS: How specific are frequencies to conformers? Primarily care about bond stretch, angle bend, high frequency that isn’t sensitive to conformers

  • LW: How is working with Chapin to look at pairwise small molecule energies? Seems relevant

    • Different objective function for torsion optimizations

    • PB: Tried fitting just torsions, not better than Sage, now trying to fit bonds/angles too

  • Where to start?

    • PB has sample branch of FB with relative energy targets

    • Best to start with new target options

    • To change targets, need to modify FB code, make new target within FB

  • BS: Problem with workflow is that it doesn’t take into account atom symmetry, e.g. penalizes rotating a methyl group to an equivalent position

    • Doesn’t affect RMSD too much, but would be good to fix it

    • RDKit has RMSD function that takes into account symmetry

    • PB just using BS code so hasn’t fixed that

Action items

Decisions

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