DD – Alchemiscale 39 – Created an example notebook, and migrated to OpenFreeEnergy/ExampleNotebooks (OFE/EN #36)
RG – I may switch over to a repex protocol to simplify things and remove OE requirement.
DD – Re: Perses OE requirement, is this a hard requirement
JC – The OE backend is needed for fragment mapping, MCSS tools, other funcitonality. Was hoping to move enough functionality into OpenFF toolkit to replace this in the long run.
JW – Seems out of scope
JC – would open up opportunities for many uses beyond FF application
MH – In perfect world we’d use OFFTK as much as possible, and then hop into RDKit+OE when we need something else. So I see it initially being as RDK/OE code, and then
JC – can go from RDKit small molecules to OE; this gets hard when you’re dealing with fragments of molecules, including proteins; OE makes it fairly straightforward
JW – OpenFF does have a vision, and it’s pretty clearly scoped around FF application
we currently have both RDKit and OE backends, and we have to build variants of features for each; do our best to smooth out differences, but of course these are different packages so they do give different behavior
JC – what if that’s relaxed? As in, is it okay for different behavior in use of the two backends within the toolkit?
JW – I would love to have a fully-usable RDKit-based OpenFF Toolkit; separate from OpenEye-based
JC – may be worth checking in with OE contact; not really clear they care if you are using OE underneath the hood; cares more about quality FFs
JC – We really want an open topology format that can interface with PDB format and other formats, and can go back and forth between identities and mappings. So I’m hoping that in the great refactoring after the next release, we can avoid a lot of these issues.
RG – My vision for the long-term vision of GUFE is to convert into RDKit to do the MCS stuff. I think trying to provide a wrapper for MCS will be super complex, instead I’d rather have it
JW – So would you ever offer a OE-only functionality? Or would everything have an RDK equivalent first?
DS – GUFE mols are just a wrapper around RDKit mols.
RG – Right, it looks like RDKit can do everything we need, even for proteins
JC – I’d love to chat about how this could be done with RDKit, including how to do partial mappings involving proteins.
MH will put together a meeting for how to do atom mappings and MCS using RDKit, inviting RG, JC, IP, MH, and JW.
JW – Just want to make sure that the basic functionality of alchemiscale won’t have a hard OE dependence.
JC – This should be the case for OpenFF and OpenFE, we’ll discuss in this meeting how to get Perses/other deps away from hard OE deps.