A molecule's geometry, also known as conformation, is one of a molecule's most important properties, determining the reactions it participates in, the bonds it forms, and the interactions it has with other molecules. Conventional conformation generation methods minimize hand-designed molecular force field energy functions that are not well correlated with the true energy function of a molecule observed in nature. They generate geometrically diverse sets of conformations, some of which are very similar to the ground-truth conformations and others of which are very different. In this paper we propose a conditional deep generative graph neural network that learns an energy function from data by directly learning to generate molecular conformations given a molecular graph. On three large scale small molecule datasets, we show that our method generates a set of conformations that on average is far more likely to be close to the corresponding reference conformations than are those obtained from conventional force field methods. Our method maintains geometrical diversity by generating conformations that are not too similar to each other, and is also computationally faster. We also show that our method can be used to provide initial coordinates for conventional force field methods. On one of the evaluated datasets we show that this combination allows us to combine the best of both methods, yielding generated conformations that are on average close to ground-truth conformations with some very similar to ground-truth conformations.

本文提出了一种基于条件深度生成图神经网络的分子构像生成方法，可以在数据驱动的基础上直接学习生成符合能量有利的、更可能在实验中被观察到的分子构像，相较于传统力场方法生成的构像更加接近于参考构像，并且保持着几何多样性，可以提供传统力场方法的初始坐标。

利用深度生成图神经网络进行分子几何预测