MD Notes

Common software

GROMACS

CHARMM

CHARMM Tutorials

AMBER

NAMD

ABINIT for free energy calculations
DL_POLY

Making it rain: Cloud-based molecular simulations for everyone

Force fields

Force fields for small molecules

There is a recent paper that covers this topic by Lin and MacKerell 1, Force fields for small molecules.

OPLS-All-Atom (OPLS-AA)
OPLS3
CHARMM General force field (CGenFF) see ParamChem
General AMBER Force Field (GAFF)
Merck Molecular Force Field (MMFF)
GROMOS
Drude Polarizable Force Field for Small Organic Molecules
Drude General Force Field (DGenFF)

Parameters for drug-like small molecules have not been reported with the AMBER polarizable force field or CHARMM FQ models.

QM calculations

To validate the parameters:

Force Field Toolkit (ffTK)
General Automatic Atomic Model Parametrization (GAAMP) utility

Also see the MacKerrell lab website

kaggle notebook on kinase inhibitors

Tutorial - Quantum Chemistry with Gaussian using GaussView

Molecular Dynamics Method 2

Explore using treeClust (machine learning) to uncover associations between residues that have high RMSD => allostery


  1. Lin, F.Y., and MacKerell, A.D. (2019). Force Fields for Small Molecules. Methods Mol. Biol. 2022: 21–54. doi: 10.1007/978-1-4939-9608-7_2 ↩︎

DGO, 29 October 2021