Tutorials
This section presents some hand-on tutorials to the chemfiles Julia package. All the code here is under the CC-0 Universal Licence which means that you are free to do whatever you want with it (i.e. it is Public Domain code)
Read a single frame
In this tutorials we will read a frame from a trajectory, and print the indexes of all the atom in the half-space x < 5
.
We start by using
the Chemfiles
package to bring in scope the needed functions:
#!/usr/bin/env julia
using chemfiles
Then we open a Trajectory and read the first frame:
trajectory = Trajectory("filename.xyz")
frame = read(trajectory)
We can now create a list to store the indices of the atoms with x < 5
, and get the positions of the atoms in the frame with the positions
function
less_than_five = UInt64[]
pos = positions(frame)
Iterating through the atoms in the frame, we get the ones matching our condition. size(::Frame)
gives the number of atoms in the frame, which is also the size of the positions
array. This positions array shape is (3, size(frame))
.
for i in 0:size(frame)
if pos[1, i] < 5
push!(less_than_five, i)
end
end
And finally we can print our results
println("Atoms with x < 5: ")
for i in less_than_five
println(" - $i")
end
Click here to see the whole program
#!/usr/bin/env julia
using chemfiles
trajectory = Trajectory("filename.xyz")
frame = read(trajectory)
less_than_five = UInt64[]
pos = positions(frame)
for i in 0:size(frame)
if pos[1, i] < 5
push!(less_than_five, i)
end
end
println("Atoms with x < 5: ")
for i in less_than_five
println(" - $i")
end
For more information about reading frame in a trajectory, see the following functions:
read_step
to directly read a given step.set_cell!(::Trajectory)
andset_topology!(::Trajectory)
to specify an unit cell or a topology for all frames in a trajectory.
Generating a structure
Now that we know how to read frames from a trajectory, let's try to create a new structure and write it to a file. As previsouly, we start by using the Chemfiles package
#!/usr/bin/env julia
using Chemfiles
Everything starts in a Topology
. This is the class that defines the atoms and the connectivity in a system. Here, we add three Atom
and two bonds to create a water molecule.
topology = Topology()
add_atom!(topology, Atom("H"))
add_atom!(topology, Atom("O"))
add_atom!(topology, Atom("H"))
add_bond!(topology, 0, 1)
add_bond!(topology, 2, 1)
We can then create a Frame
corresponding to this topology. We resize the frame to ensure that the frame and the topology contains the same number of atoms.
frame = Frame()
resize!(frame, 3)
set_topology!(frame, topology)
We can then set the atomic positions:
pos = frame.positions()
pos[1, :] = [1.0, 0.0, 0.0]
pos[2, :] = [0.0, 0.0, 0.0]
pos[3, :] = [0.0, 1.0, 0.0]
Another possibility is to directly add atoms to the frame. Here we define a second molecule representing carbon dioxyde. add_atom!
takes three arguments: the frame, the atom, and the position of the atom.
add_atom!(frame, Atom("O"), [5.0, 0.0, 0.0])
add_atom!(frame, Atom("C"), [6.0, 0.0, 0.0])
add_atom!(frame, Atom("O"), [7.0, 0.0, 0.0])
add_bond!(frame, 3, 4)
add_bond!(frame, 4, 5)
Finally, we can set the UnitCell
associated with this frame.
set_cell!(frame, UnitCell(10, 10, 10))
Now that our frame is constructed, it is time to write it to a file. For that, we open a trajectory in write ('w'
) mode, and write to it, using the same syntax as a standard Julia open(...) do ... end
block
Trajectory("water-co2.pdb", 'w') do trajectory
write(trajectory, frame)
end
Click here to see the whole program
#!/usr/bin/env julia
using Chemfiles
topology = Topology()
add_atom!(topology, Atom("H"))
add_atom!(topology, Atom("O"))
add_atom!(topology, Atom("H"))
add_bond!(topology, 0, 1)
add_bond!(topology, 2, 1)
frame = Frame()
resize!(frame, 3)
set_topology!(frame, topology)
pos = frame.positions()
pos[1, :] = [1.0, 0.0, 0.0]
pos[2, :] = [0.0, 0.0, 0.0]
pos[3, :] = [0.0, 1.0, 0.0]
add_atom!(frame, Atom("O"), [5.0, 0.0, 0.0])
add_atom!(frame, Atom("C"), [6.0, 0.0, 0.0])
add_atom!(frame, Atom("O"), [7.0, 0.0, 0.0])
add_bond!(frame, 3, 4)
add_bond!(frame, 4, 5)
set_cell!(frame, UnitCell(10, 10, 10))
Trajectory("water-co2.pdb", 'w') do trajectory
write(trajectory, frame)
end
Using selections
Now that we know how to read and write frame from trajectories, how about we do a bit a filtering? In this tutorial, we will read all the frames from a file, and use selections to filter which atoms we will write back to another file. This example will also show how chemfiles can be used to convert from a file format to another one.
We start by opening the two trajectories we will need
trajectory = Trajectory("input.arc")
output = Trajectory("output.pdb", 'w')
And we create a Selection
object to filter the atoms we want to remove.
selection = Selection("name Zn or name N")
Then we can iterate over all the frames in the trajectory, and use the selection to get the list of atoms to remove. The result of evaluate
is a list containing the atoms matching the selection.
for frame in trajectory
to_remove = evaluate(selection, frame)
In order to remove the atoms from the frame, we need to sort the to_remove
list in descending order: removing the atom at index i
will shift the index of all the atoms after i
. So we start from the end and work toward the start of the frame.
for i in reverse(sort(to_remove))
remove_atom!(frame, i)
end
Finally, we can write the cleaned frame to the output file, and start the next iteration.
write(output, frame)
end
Since we opened the files directly instead of using a do ... end
block, we hae to close them to flush all buffers and release file descriptors.
close(trajectory)
# When running on the REPL, closing the trajectory
# is required to flush buffered output and finish writing
close(output)
Click here to see the whole program
#!/usr/bin/env julia
using Chemfiles
trajectory = Trajectory("input.arc")
output = Trajectory("output.pdb", 'w')
selection = Selection("name Zn or name N")
for frame in trajectory
to_remove = evaluate(selection, frame)
for i in reverse(sort(to_remove))
remove_atom!(frame, i)
end
write(output, frame)
end
close(trajectory)
# When running on the REPL, closing the trajectory
# is required to flush buffered output and finish writing
close(output)