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Confab – generation of diverse low energy conformers
Journal of Cheminformatics volume 3, Article number: P32 (2011)
We present a new program for conformer generation, Confab, which aims to generate diverse low energy conformers that span the space of all possible conformations. Such conformers are required for use in fields such as docking and pharmacophore searching and generation.
Confab uses a torsion driving approach to travel through the set of systematically generated conformers selecting those which are below a particular energy cutoff and which are structurally distinct (according to a user-specified RMSD) from those conformers already selected. The RMSD is evaluated using Kabsch alignment [1] of heavy atoms and takes symmetry into account. To improve performance, the alignment is carried out using the Eigen maths library [2], an open source library with an emphasis on speed and efficiency. In addition, the initial pass through the set of conformers uses a tree data structure to minimise the number of alignments required to identify a structure as similar to a previous one.
References
Kabsch W: A solution of the best rotation to relate two sets of vectors. Acta Cryst. A. 1976, 32: 922-923. 10.1107/S0567739476001873.
Eigen – A C++ template library for linear algebra. version 2.0. Available from http://eigen.tuxfamily.org
Open Babel. version 2.3.0. Available from http://openbabel.org
Guha R, Howard MT, Hutchison GR, Murray-Rust P, Rzepa H, Steinbeck C, Wegner JK, Willighagen E: The Blue Obelisk – Interoperability in Chemical Informatics. J Chem Inf Model. 2006, 46: 991-998. 10.1021/ci050400b.
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O’Boyle, N., Vandermeersch, T. & Hutchison, G. Confab – generation of diverse low energy conformers. J Cheminform 3 (Suppl 1), P32 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1186/1758-2946-3-S1-P32
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1186/1758-2946-3-S1-P32
Keywords
- Data Structure
- Open Source
- Tree Data
- Heavy Atom
- Energy Cutoff