Prediction of organic homolytic bond dissociation enthalpies at near chemical accuracy with sub-second computational cost.
basic_science · Level V
Where this comes from
- Record sourced from PubMed, PMID 32393773.
- Also identified by DOI 10.1038/s41467-020-16201-z and PMC identifier 7214445.
- Licence recorded as CC BY.
- The licence permits redistribution, so the abstract is shown in full and the full text is available from the publisher.
Abstract
Bond dissociation enthalpies (BDEs) of organic molecules play a fundamental role in determining chemical reactivity and selectivity. However, BDE computations at sufficiently high levels of quantum mechanical theory require substantial computing resources. In this paper, we develop a machine learning model capable of accurately predicting BDEs for organic molecules in a fraction of a second. We perform automated density functional theory (DFT) calculations at the M06-2X/def2-TZVP level of theory for 42,577 small organic molecules, resulting in 290,664 BDEs. A graph neural network trained on a subset of these results achieves a mean absolute error of 0.58 kcal mol<sup>-1</sup> (vs DFT) for BDEs of unseen molecules. We further demonstrate the model on two applications: first, we rapidly and accurately predict major sites of hydrogen abstraction in the metabolism of drug-like molecules, and second, we determine the dominant molecular fragmentation pathways during soot formation.