Artificial bees collect diverse conformers of small organic molecules

Abstract

The conformational mobility of organic molecules defined as a variability of practically accessible conformers plays a critical role in determining electronic, chemical, and physical properties within computational methods. At the same time, there is a challenge of identifying compact set of global and local conformers for the comprehensive description of potential energy surface. Here we apply nature-inspired algorithms to resolve this issue. Among all the considered algorithms, the artificial bee colony optimizer exhibits the highest performance in discovering conformers detected both in gas and condensed phases. We hope that our approach enables researchers to make a next step in organic crystal packing studies.