SPICE 2 is close to finished, which means this is a good time to discuss possible additions for version 3. Here are some ideas to get things started.
- Nonbonded interactions between amino acids. SPICE 2 has a lot of data on nonbonded interactions, but nothing that is specifically for pairs of amino acids. That's very important for proteins. We could base it on PDB structures. Select pairs of amino acids that are close together in space but not bonded to each other, cap them, and calculate their interaction.
- Dihedral scans or transition states. I'm not sure whether this is needed or not. We can test it by fitting a model to SPICE 2, calculating energies for some of the OpenFF dihedral scans, and see how well it does at the barrier heights.
- Active learning. We can use this to identify new conformations for existing molecules that would improve accuracy in poorly sampled areas of the energy surface.
- Nucleic acids.
- Lipids. I'm thinking of this mainly in the context of simulating membrane proteins.
- Enamine building blocks. More chemical diversity is always useful. This didn't happen for version 2. Maybe for version 3?
- Breaking/forming bonds. All our current data only has fully formed bonds. We don't have any data about barriers during bond formation. If we decide to go in this direction, a good place to start might be detaching hydrogens. This would be useful for simulating constant pH. For example, we could use the DES monomers. For every hydrogen, move it away from the atom it's bonded to in 0.1 A steps until it is fully detached.
SPICE 2 is close to finished, which means this is a good time to discuss possible additions for version 3. Here are some ideas to get things started.