PUCKERING
This is part of the colvar module

Calculate sugar pseudorotation coordinates.

This command can be used to calculate ring's pseudorotations in sugars (puckers). It works for both 5-membered and 6-membered rings. Notice that there are two different implementations depending if one passes 5 or 6 atoms in the ATOMS keyword.

For 5-membered rings the implementation is the one discussed in [53] . This implementation is simple and can be used in RNA to distinguish C2'-endo and C3'-endo conformations. Both the polar coordinates (phs and amp) and the Cartesian coordinates (Zx and Zy) are provided. C2'-endo conformations have negative Zx, whereas C3'-endo conformations have positive Zy. Notation is consistent with [53] . The five atoms should be provided as C4',O4',C1',C2',C3'. Notice that this is the same order that can be obtained using the MOLINFO syntax (see example below).

For 6-membered rings the implementation is the general Cremer-Pople one [34] as also discussed in [15] . This implementation provides both a triplet with Cartesian components (qx, qy, and qz) and a triplet of polar components (amplitude, phi, and theta). Applications of this particular implementation are to be published (paper in preparation).

Note
The 6-membered ring implementation distributed with previous versions of PLUMED lead to qx and qy values that had an opposite sign with respect to those originally defined in [34]. The bug is fixed in version 2.5.

Components of this action are:

Examples

This input tells plumed to print the puckering phase angle of the second nucleotide of a RNA molecule on file COLVAR.

Click on the labels of the actions for more information on what each action computes
tested on master
#SETTINGS MOLFILE=regtest/basic/rt65/AA.pdb
MOLINFO 
STRUCTURE
compulsory keyword a file in pdb format containing a reference structure.
=rna.pdb
MOLTYPE
compulsory keyword ( default=protein ) what kind of molecule is contained in the pdb file - usually not needed since protein/RNA/DNA are compatible
=rna puck: PUCKERING
ATOMS
the five or six atoms of the sugar ring in the proper order.
=@sugar-2
PRINT ARG=puck.phs FILE=COLVAR
Glossary of keywords and components
Description of components

By default this Action calculates the following quantities. These quantities can be referenced elsewhere in the input by using this Action's label followed by a dot and the name of the quantity required from the list below.

Quantity Description
phs Pseudorotation phase (5 membered rings)
amp Pseudorotation amplitude (5 membered rings)
Zx Pseudorotation x Cartesian component (5 membered rings)
Zy Pseudorotation y Cartesian component (5 membered rings)
phi Pseudorotation phase (6 membered rings)
theta Theta angle (6 membered rings)
amplitude Pseudorotation amplitude (6 membered rings)
qx Cartesian component x (6 membered rings)
qy Cartesian component y (6 membered rings)
qz Cartesian component z (6 membered rings)
The atoms involved can be specified using
ATOMS the five or six atoms of the sugar ring in the proper order. For more information on how to specify lists of atoms see Groups and Virtual Atoms
Options
NUMERICAL_DERIVATIVES

( default=off ) calculate the derivatives for these quantities numerically