<div>Local chemical space exploration of an experimentally synthesized material can be done by making slight structural</div><div>variations of the synthesized material. This generation of many molecular structures with reasonable quality,</div><div>that resemble an existing (chemical) purposeful material, is needed for high-throughput screening purposes in</div><div>material design. Large databases of geometry and chemical properties of transition metal complexes are not</div><div>readily available, although these complexes are widely used in homogeneous catalysis. A Python-based workflow,</div><div>ChemSpaX, that is aimed at automating local chemical space exploration for any type of molecule, is introduced.</div><div>The overall computational workflow of ChemSpaX is explained in more detail. ChemSpaX uses 3D information,</div><div>to place functional groups on an input structure. For example, the input structure can be a catalyst for which one</div><div>wants to use high-throughput screening to investigate if the catalytic activity can be improved. The newly placed</div><div>substituents are optimized using a computationally cheap force-field optimization method. After placement of</div><div>new substituents, higher level optimizations using xTB or DFT instead of force-field optimization are also possible</div><div>in the current workflow. In representative applications of ChemSpaX, it is shown that the structures generated by</div><div>ChemSpaX have a reasonable quality for usage in high-throughput screening applications. Representative applications</div><div>of ChemSpaX are shown by investigating various adducts on functionalized Mn-based pincer complexes,</div><div>hydrogenation of Ru-based pincer complexes, functionalization of cobalt porphyrin complexes and functionalization</div><div>of a bipyridyl functionalized cobalt-porphyrin trapped in a M2L4 type cage complex. Descriptors such as</div><div>the Gibbs free energy of reaction and HOMO-LUMO gap, that can be used in data-driven design and discovery</div><div>of catalysts, were selected and studied in more detail for the selected use cases. The relatively fast GFN2-xTB</div><div>method was used to calculate these descriptors and a comparison was done against DFT calculated descriptors.</div><div>ChemSpaX is open-source and aims to bolster the efforts of the scientific community towards data-driven material</div><div>discovery.</div>
Generic strategies for chemical space exploration
