J Chem Inf Model
February 2025
Accurate prediction of molecular geometries is crucial for drug discovery and materials science. Existing fast conformer prediction algorithms often rely on approximate empirical energy functions, resulting in low accuracy. More accurate methods like ab initio molecular dynamics and Markov chain Monte Carlo can be computationally expensive due to the need for evaluating quantum mechanical energy functions.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFLigand design problems involve searching chemical space for a molecule with a set of desired properties. As chemical space is discrete, this search must be conducted in a pointwise manner, separately investigating one molecule at a time, which can be inefficient. We propose a method called "Flexible Topology", where a ligand is composed of a set of shapeshifting "ghost" atoms, whose atomic identities and connectivity can dynamically change over the course of a simulation.
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