Using ipywidgets and py3Dmol to browse conformations in jupyter

Disclaimer: This is unfortunately one where you need a backend server to do have a live widget, so I'm using standard blogger and screenshots.

I've been looking at a lot of conformational manifolds lately. I used to do this with the RDKit's PyMol integration, but since that doesn't run on either of my laptops and since py3DMol looks awesome, I invested a bit of time in figuring out how to make it work with ipywidgets in jupyter. I figure this might be useful to others (and having the code online will be useful to me as well!), I'm doing another short post.

What I want to do is generate a set of conformers for a molecule and scroll through them interactively. Here's some code for doing that:

    def drawit(m,p,confId=-1):
        mb = Chem.MolToMolBlock(m,confId=confId)
        p.removeAllModels()
        p.addModel(mb,'sdf')
        p.setStyle({'stick':{}})
        p.setBackgroundColor('0xeeeeee')
        p.zoomTo()
        return p.show()

You use it like this:

    import py3Dmol
    from rdkit import Chem
    from rdkit.Chem import AllChem
    from ipywidgets import interact, interactive, fixed

    m = Chem.MolFromSmiles(r'COc1ccc2[nH]c([S@@+]([O-])Cc3ncc(C)c(OC)c3C)nc2c1') # esomeprazole
    m = Chem.AddHs(m)
    AllChem.EmbedMultipleConfs(m,numConfs=10,randomSeed=0xf00d,useExpTorsionAnglePrefs=True,\
                           useBasicKnowledge=True)
    # align to one of the ring systems:
    AllChem.AlignMolConformers(m,m.GetSubstructMatch(Chem.MolFromSmarts('c1[nH]c2ccccc2n1')))

    # now construct the view and interactive widget:
    p = py3Dmol.view(width=400,height=400)
    interact(drawit, m=fixed(m),p=fixed(p),confId=(0,m.GetNumConformers()-1));

And here's what the output looks like in the notebook:





Simple and, I think, quite useful.

You can also display the whole bundle at once:

    def drawit2(m,p,confId=-1):
        mb = Chem.MolToMolBlock(m,confId=confId)
        p.addModel(mb,'sdf')
        p.setStyle({'stick':{}})
        p.setBackgroundColor('0xeeeeee')
        p.zoomTo()
    
    p = py3Dmol.view(width=400,height=400)
    for confId in range(10):
        drawit2(m,p,confId)
    p.show()

This yields: