IM-UFF: Extending the universal force field for interactive molecular modeling

Abstract

The universal force field (UFF) is a broadly applicable classical force field that contains parameters for almost every atom type of the periodic table. This force field is non-reactive, i.e. the topology of the system under study is considered as fixed and no creation or breaking of covalent bonds is possible. This paper introduces interactive modeling-UFF (IM-UFF), an extension of UFF that combines the possibility to significantly modify molecular structures (as with reactive force fields) with a broad diversity of supported systems thanks to the universality of UFF. Such an extension lets the user easily build and edit molecular systems interactively while being guided by physics based inter-atomic forces. This approach introduces weighted atom types and weighted bonds, used to update topologies and atom parameterizations at every time step of a simulation. IM-UFF has been evaluated on a large set of benchmarks and is proposed as a self-contained implementation integrated in a new module for the SAMSON software platform for computational nanoscience available at http://www.samson-connect.net.

Keywords: Empirical force fields; Interactive modeling; Interactive simulation; Molecular perception; Universal force field.