Informatics Institute faculty member Prof. Dr. Adem Tekin and PhD student Samet Demir coauthored a paper titled 'FFCASP: A Massively Parallel Crystal Structure Prediction Algorithm' has been published in 'Journal of Chemical Theory and Computation'.

https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.jctc.0c01197

Abstract:
A new algorithm called Fast and Flexible CrystAl Structure Predictor (FFCASP) was developed to predict the structure of covalent and molecular crystals. FFCASP is massively parallel and able to handle more than 200 atoms in the unit cell (in other terms, it allows global optimization around 100 individual parameters). It uses a global optimizer specialized for Crystal Structure Prediction (CSP) which combines particle swarm and simulated annealing optimizers. Three different molecular crystals, including diverse intermolecular interactions, namely, cytosine, coumarin, and pyrazinamide, have been selected to evaluate the performance of FFCASP. While cytosine polymorphs have been searched by employing two different force fields (a DFT-SAPT based intermolecular potential and generalized amber force field (GAFF)) up to Z = 16, only GAFF has been used both in coumarin and pyrazinamide polymorph searches up to Z = 4. For these three molecular crystals, FFCASP generated more than 20 000 crystal structures, and the unique ones have been further treated by DFT-D3. A combination of data mining and a machine learning approach was introduced to determine the unique structures and their distribution into different clusters, which ultimately gives an opportunity to retrieve the common features and relations between the resulting structures. There are two known experimental crystal structures of cytosine, and both were successfully located with FFCASP. Two of the reported crystal structures of coumarin have been reproduced. Similarly, in pyrazinamide, three known experimental structures have been rediscovered. In addition to finding the experimentally known structures, FFCASP also located other low-energy structures for each considered molecular crystals. These successes of FFCASP offer the possibility to discover the polymorphic nature of other important molecular crystals (e.g., drugs) as well.

Abstract Image

İTÜ Informatics Institute

bilisim-anasayfa-hakkimizda

ITU Informatics Institute provides graduate-level education and research in applied informatics, computer sciences, computational science and engineering, communication systems under the following programs.

Faculty members and students conduct research supported by national and international organızatıons in the fields of electromagnetic fields, communication systems/regulations, computational materials design, computational chemistry/biology, cryptography, signal/data processing/visualization, big data management, climate and ocean sciences, 

  • List of Most Influential Scientists; Associate Professor. B. Uğur Töreyin (article by Dr. John PA Ioannidis, K. W. Boyack and J. Baas published in the journal PLOS Biology)
  • Beltus Nkwawir Wiysobunri, the best project award in the Science category, in the 2020 International Students Project Competition
  • Argenit company, of which Dr. Abdulkerim Çapar is among the founding partners, received the "National-International Supports" First Prize of ITU ARI Teknokent.
  • TÜBİTAK 2242 University Students Project Competition in Priority Areas: Istanbul region first place - Ahmet Burak Özyurt
  • Best Presentation Award at ICAT'18 Conference: Sena Efsun Cebeci, 2018
  • Tubitak Incentive Award; 2016 Assoc. Prof. Adem Tekin
  • “Technical Paper” and “Willis H. Carrier” Award by the American Heating, Cooling and Air Conditioning Association; 2016 Assist. Prof. Dr. H. Salih Erden
  • Science Heroes Association Young Scientist of the Year Award; 2016 Assoc. B. Uğur Töreyin Best Poster Award at PRACEdays 2016 conference; Samet Demir
  • ITU Most Successful Thesis Award; 2016 Hatice Gokcan

There is also a High Performance Computing Laboratory established with the support of the State Planning Organization within the Institute.