- Takaba, Kenichiro;
- Friedman, Anika;
- Cavender, Chapin;
- Behara, Pavan;
- Pulido, Iván;
- Henry, Michael;
- MacDermott-Opeskin, Hugo;
- Iacovella, Christopher;
- Nagle, Arnav;
- Payne, Alexander;
- Shirts, Michael;
- Mobley, David;
- Chodera, John;
- Wang, Yuanqing
The development of reliable and extensible molecular mechanics (MM) force fields-fast, empirical models characterizing the potential energy surface of molecular systems-is indispensable for biomolecular simulation and computer-aided drug design. Here, we introduce a generalized and extensible machine-learned MM force field, espaloma-0.3, and an end-to-end differentiable framework using graph neural networks to overcome the limitations of traditional rule-based methods. Trained in a single GPU-day to fit a large and diverse quantum chemical dataset of over 1.1 M energy and force calculations, espaloma-0.3 reproduces quantum chemical energetic properties of chemical domains highly relevant to drug discovery, including small molecules, peptides, and nucleic acids. Moreover, this force field maintains the quantum chemical energy-minimized geometries of small molecules and preserves the condensed phase properties of peptides and folded proteins, self-consistently parametrizing proteins and ligands to produce stable simulations leading to highly accurate predictions of binding free energies. This methodology demonstrates significant promise as a path forward for systematically building more accurate force fields that are easily extensible to new chemical domains of interest.