Partial to Total Generation of 3D Transition-Metal Complexes

The design of transition-metal complexes (TMCs) has drawn much attention over the years because of their important applications as metallodrugs and functional materials. In this work, we present an extension of our recently reported approach, LigandDiff [Jin et al. J. Chem. Theory Comput. 20, 4377(2024)]. The new model, which we call multi-LigandDiff, is more flexible and greatly outperforms its predecessor. This scaffold-based diffusion model allows de novo ligand design with either existing ligands or without any ligand. Moreover, it allows users to predefine the denticity of the generated ligand. Our results indicate that multi-LigandDiff can generate well-defined ligands and is transferable to multiple transition metals and coordination geometries. In terms of its application, multi-LigandDiff successfully designed 338 Fe(II) spin-crossover (SCO) complexes from only 47 experimentally validated SCO complexes. And these generated complexes are configurationally diverse and structurally reasonable. Overall, the results show that multi-LigandDiff is an ideal tool to design novel TMCs from scratch.