A quantum chemical interaction energy dataset for accurately modeling protein-ligand interactions

Fast and accurate calculation of intermolecular interaction energies is desirable for understanding many chemical and biological processes, including the binding of small molecules to proteins. The Splinter [“Symmetry-adapted perturbation theory (SAPT0) protein-ligand interaction”] dataset has been created to facilitate the development and improvement of methods for performing such calculations. Molecular fragments representing commonly found substructures in proteins and small-molecule ligands were paired into >9000 unique dimers, assembled into numerous configurations using an approach designed to adequately cover the breadth of the dimers’ potential energy surfaces while enhancing sampling in favorable regions. ~1.5 million configurations of these dimers were randomly generated, and a structurally diverse subset of these were minimized to obtain an additional ~80 thousand local and global minima. For all >1.6 million configurations, SAPT0 calculations were performed with two basis sets to complete the dataset. It is expected that Splinter will be a useful benchmark dataset for training and testing various methods for the calculation of intermolecular interaction energies.