Renewing NIH funding for the Open Force Field Initiative
Posted on 15 Mar 2023 by John Chodera
Over the past three years, Open Force Field Initiative’s work towards the development of general biomolecular force fields has been supported in part by NIH grant R01 GM132386. This grant is funded through the NIGMS Focused Technology Research & Development R01 program, which supports the development of innovative new technologies that enable biological discovery.
This support has been essential in enabling us to better serve the molecular simulation and force field development community. Over the past three years, we have accomplished a great deal, including:
- Releasing two generations of open small molecule force fields, Parsley (openff-1.x) and Sage (openff-2.x), which have collectively been downloaded over 209K times, that incorporate a host of methodological developments
- Producing the Open Force Field Toolkit to prepare systems with the force fields developed by OpenFF (which has now been downloaded over 177K times) for using and modifying these force fields
- Curating open datasets for building and assessing force fields
- Developing an open software infrastructure for building and extending force fields
- Generating 15 open access publications and preprints describing the innovations behind the Open Force Field Initiative
As an open science effort, we aim to be maximally transparent with the community we serve about both our activities and our future roadmap. We’re excited to share all of the exciting science we’ve done—especially new prototype technologies that we are eager to put into production that will significantly improve the generalizability, domain of applicability, and robustness of predictions for the community, and what we’d love to do in the next few years. To this end, we’re thrilled to share the NIH Focused Technology R&D research proposal we have just submitted to extend our grant by another four years. We look forward to hearing feedback from the community about how we can continue to provide the best open technology to enable the rapid construction, assessment, and deployment of high-quality force fields for biomolecular simulation and design.