OpenMSCG: A Software Tool for Bottom-up Coarse-graining

The “bottom-up” approach to coarse-graining – for building accurate and efficient computational models to simulate large-scale and complex phenomena and processes – is an important approach in computational chemistry, biophysics, and materials science. As one example, the multiscale coarse-graining (MS-CG) approach to developing CG models can be rigorously derived using statistical mechanics applied to fine-grained, i.e., all-atom simulation data for a given system. Under a number of circumstances, a systematic procedure such as MS-CG modeling is particularly valuable. Here we present the development of the OpenMSCG software, a modularized open-source software that provides a collection of successful and widely applied bottom-up CG methods, including Boltzmann Inversion (BI), Force-Matching (FM), Ultra-Coarse-Graining (UCG), Relative Entropy Minimization (REM), Essential Dynamics Coarse-Graining (ED-CG), and Heterogeneous Elastic Network Modeling (HeteroENM). OpenMSCG is a high-performance and comprehensive toolset that can be used to derive CG models from large-scale fine-grained simulation data in file formats from common molecular dynamics (MD) software packages, such as GROMACS, LAMMPS and NAMD. OpenMSCG is modulized in the Python programming framework, which allows users to create and customize modeling “recipes” for reproducible results, thus greatly improving the reliability, reproducibility, and sharing of bottom-up CG models and their applications.