Issue 32, 2021

Predicting chemical shifts with graph neural networks

Abstract

Inferring molecular structure from Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) measurements requires an accurate forward model that can predict chemical shifts from 3D structure. Current forward models are limited to specific molecules like proteins and state-of-the-art models are not differentiable. Thus they cannot be used with gradient methods like biased molecular dynamics. Here we use graph neural networks (GNNs) for NMR chemical shift prediction. Our GNN can model chemical shifts accurately and capture important phenomena like hydrogen bonding induced downfield shift between multiple proteins, secondary structure effects, and predict shifts of organic molecules. Previous empirical NMR models of protein NMR have relied on careful feature engineering with domain expertise. These GNNs are trained from data alone with no feature engineering yet are as accurate and can work on arbitrary molecular structures. The models are also efficient, able to compute one million chemical shifts in about 5 seconds. This work enables a new category of NMR models that have multiple interacting types of macromolecules.

Graphical abstract: Predicting chemical shifts with graph neural networks

Supplementary files

Article information

Article type
Edge Article
Submitted
01 Apr 2021
Accepted
09 Jul 2021
First published
09 Jul 2021
This article is Open Access

All publication charges for this article have been paid for by the Royal Society of Chemistry
Creative Commons BY license

Chem. Sci., 2021,12, 10802-10809

Predicting chemical shifts with graph neural networks

Z. Yang, M. Chakraborty and A. D. White, Chem. Sci., 2021, 12, 10802 DOI: 10.1039/D1SC01895G

This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported Licence. You can use material from this article in other publications without requesting further permissions from the RSC, provided that the correct acknowledgement is given.

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