Conformational analysis by scaled energy embedding

Distance geometry has been used for some years to find conformations of molecules consistent with given bounds on the interatomic distances. A recent extension of the method, called energy embedding, enforces the geometric constraints as before, but also biases the results toward low‐energy structures. Now a significant improvement on energy embedding is presented, which is less dependent on local optimization for satisfying the geometric constraints. Tests on very small systems with well understood energy functions show that the global minimum energy value is often attained, and geometric constraints are always satisfied.