Molecular Graph Modularity as a Descriptor for Property Estimation—Application to the Viscosity of Biomass-Derived Molecules

<div>Prediction of combustion-related properties of (oxygenated) hydrocarbons is an important and challenging task for which quantitative structure-property relationship (QSPR) models are frequently employed. Recently, a machine learning method, graph neural networks (GNNs), has shown promising results for the prediction of structure-property relationships. GNNs utilize a graph representation of molecules, where atoms correspond to nodes and bonds to edges containing information about the molecular structure. More specifically, GNNs learn physico-chemical properties as a function of the molecular graph in a supervised learning setup using a backpropagation algorithm. This end-to-end learning approach eliminates the need for selection of molecular descriptors or structural groups, as it learns optimal fingerprints through graph convolutions and maps the fingerprints to the physico-chemical properties by deep learning. We develop GNN models for predicting three fuel ignition quality indicators, i.e., the derived cetane number (DCN), the research octane number (RON), and the motor octane number (MON), of oxygenated and non-oxygenated hydrocarbons. In light of limited experimental data in the order of hundreds, we propose a combination of multi-task learning, transfer learning, and ensemble learning. The results show competitive performance of the proposed GNN approach compared to state-of-the-art QSPR models making it a promising field for future research. The prediction tool is available via a web front-end at www.avt.rwth-aachen.de/gnn.</div>

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SAMPL6 Challenge Results from pKa Predictions Based on a General Gaussian Process Model

10.26434/chemrxiv.6406505.v2 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Caitlin C. Bannan ◽

David Mobley ◽

A. Geoff Skillman

Keyword(s):

Gaussian Process ◽

Process Model ◽

Molecular Graph ◽

Gaussian Process Regression ◽

Ionization State ◽

Training Set ◽

Physiochemical Properties ◽

Quantile Plots ◽

Physical And Chemical ◽

Good Agreement

<div>A variety of fields would benefit from accurate pK<sub>a</sub> predictions, especially drug design due to the affect a change in ionization state can have on a molecules physiochemical properties.</div><div>Participants in the recent SAMPL6 blind challenge were asked to submit predictions for microscopic and macroscopic pK<sub>a</sub>s of 24 drug like small molecules.</div><div>We recently built a general model for predicting pK<sub>a</sub>s using a Gaussian process regression trained using physical and chemical features of each ionizable group.</div><div>Our pipeline takes a molecular graph and uses the OpenEye Toolkits to calculate features describing the removal of a proton.</div><div>These features are fed into a Scikit-learn Gaussian process to predict microscopic pK<sub>a</sub>s which are then used to analytically determine macroscopic pK<sub>a</sub>s.</div><div>Our Gaussian process is trained on a set of 2,700 macroscopic pK<sub>a</sub>s from monoprotic and select diprotic molecules.</div><div>Here, we share our results for microscopic and macroscopic predictions in the SAMPL6 challenge.</div><div>Overall, we ranked in the middle of the pack compared to other participants, but our fairly good agreement with experiment is still promising considering the challenge molecules are chemically diverse and often polyprotic while our training set is predominately monoprotic.</div><div>Of particular importance to us when building this model was to include an uncertainty estimate based on the chemistry of the molecule that would reflect the likely accuracy of our prediction. </div><div>Our model reports large uncertainties for the molecules that appear to have chemistry outside our domain of applicability, along with good agreement in quantile-quantile plots, indicating it can predict its own accuracy.</div><div>The challenge highlighted a variety of means to improve our model, including adding more polyprotic molecules to our training set and more carefully considering what functional groups we do or do not identify as ionizable. </div>

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Multi-Resolution Autoregressive Graph-to-Graph Translation for Molecules

10.26434/chemrxiv.8266745.v1 ◽

2019 ◽

Author(s):

Wengong Jin ◽

Regina Barzilay ◽

Tommi S Jaakkola

Keyword(s):

Drug Discovery ◽

State Of The Art ◽

Molecular Graph ◽

Biochemical Properties ◽

Large Margin ◽

Previous State ◽

Translation Methods ◽

Atom Level ◽

Precursor Molecules ◽

Prior State

The problem of accelerating drug discovery relies heavily on automatic tools to optimize precursor molecules to afford them with better biochemical properties. Our work in this paper substantially extends prior state-of-the-art on graph-to-graph translation methods for molecular optimization. In particular, we realize coherent multi-resolution representations by interweaving trees over substructures with the atom-level encoding of the original molecular graph. Moreover, our graph decoder is fully autoregressive, and interleaves each step of adding a new substructure with the process of resolving its connectivity to the emerging molecule. We evaluate our model on multiple molecular optimization tasks and show that our model outperforms previous state-of-the-art baselines by a large margin.

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