The pucke.rs toolkit to facilitate sampling the conformational space of biomolecular monomers

Abstract

Understanding of the structural and dynamic behaviour of molecules is a major objective in molecular modeling research. Sampling through the torsional space is an efficient way to map their behaviour. However, generating a landscape of possible conformations relies on multiple formalisms whose mathematics are often difficult to convert to code. Here we present a command line tool and a scripting module to provide the means to generate such landscapes with different axes according to various formalisms exploited for conformational sampling. Additionally to this toolkit, we apply a benchmarking study on subjecting a DNA nucleoside to a diverse set of quantum mechanical levels of theory for geometry optimisations and energy potential calculations. The potential of the tool is demonstrated on examples including amino acids and synthetic nucleosides having five-membered or six-membered sugar moieties.