Saturday, October 31, 2020

atom_mapper: matching all atoms in reactants and products

 

It's almost 3 years ago that I wrote about atom mapper and now the code has received a major overhaul thanks to my PhD student Mads Koerstz. The 2D atom mapping part is basically left untouched, but the main new thing is a general implementation of the 3D mapping problem. 

The 3D mapping problem is that if labels (i.e. atom orders) are considered then all tetrahedral centers are chiral and the chirality of centers with equivalent atoms, such as CH2 groups, generated by RDKit's embed function will be arbitrary and unlikely to match in reactants and products. This creates problems for methods such as nudged elastic band (NEB) that try to determine the reaction path by interpolation.

Mads found a clever approach using chiral atom tags, where he generates arbitrary tags for the reactant and makes sure the tags match in the product. If there are true chiral centers he also generates all enantiomers.

The old version had some code that tried to align the coordinates, but that has been removed since that can be done much better with xTBs reaction path method.

Here is a demo notebook 


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