Molecular modelling conformational analysis energy

Whereas many scientists shared Mulliken s initial skepticism regarding the practical role of theory in solving problems in chemistry and physics, the work of London (6) on dispersion forces in 1930 and Hbckel s 7t-electron theory in 1931 (7) continued to attract the interest of many, including a young scientist named Frank Westheimer who, drawing on the physics of internal motions as detailed by Pitzer (8), first applied the basic concepts of what is now called molecular mechanics to compute the rates of the racemization of ortho-dibromobiphenyls. The 1946 publication (9) of these results would lay the foundation for Westheimer s own systematic conformational analysis studies (10) as well as for many others, eg, Hendrickson s (11) and Allinger s (12). These scientists would utilize basic Newtonian mechanics coupled with concepts from spectroscopy (13,14) to develop nonquantum mechanical models of structures, energies, and reactivity. 

The following definition of computational chemistry was published in 1985 (6) quantitative modeling of chemical behavior on a computer by the formalisms of theoretical chemistry. Some quantum theoreticians naturally would like to see computational chemistry as a subset of their field (7). However, today the number of scientists employed as computational chemists well exceeds the number employed as theoreticians (8). A recent textbook author (9) views computational chemistry as encompassing not only quantum mechanics, but also molecular mechanics, [energy] minimization, simulations, conformational analysis, and other computer-based methods for understanding and predicting the behavior of molecular systems. ... 

For the construction of molecular structures, a 2D formula editor is provided in combination with 3D conversion. Standard potential energy minimization is performed using the modified parameter set of the CHARMm force field [68] the conformational models are built using Monte Carlo conformational analysis together with poling as described in the next section. 

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