Benchmark Assessment of Molecular Geometries and Energies from Small Molecule Force Fields

Abstract

<div>Force fields are used in a wide variety of contexts for classical molecular simulation, including studies on protein-ligand binding, membrane permeation, and thermophysical property prediction. The quality of these studies relies on the quality of the force fields used to represent the systems. </div><div>Focusing on small molecules of fewer than 50 heavy atoms, our aim in this work is to compare six force fields: GAFF, GAFF2, MMFF94, MMFF94S, SMIRNOFF99Frosst, and the Open Force Field version 1.0 (Parsley) force field. On a dataset comprising over 26,000 molecular structures, we analyzed their force field-optimized geometries and conformer energies compared to reference quantum mechanical (QM) data. We show that most of these force fields are comparable in accuracy at reproducing gas-phase QM geometries and energetics, but that GAFF/GAFF2/Parsley do slightly better in reproducing QM energies and that MMFF94/MMFF94S perform slightly better in geometries. Parsley shows considerable improvement over its predecessor SMIRNOFF99Frosst, and we identify particular outlying chemical groups for further force field improvement.</div>