Original author(s) Written in FORTRAN 77 | Development status Active | |
Initial release September 8, 2004; 12 years ago (2004-09-08) Stable release 7.1 / May 12, 2015; 22 months ago (2015-05-12) | ||
Tinker, stylized as TINKER, is a computer software application for molecular dynamics simulation with a complete and general package for molecular mechanics and molecular dynamics, with some special features for biopolymers. The core of the package is a modular set of callable routines which allow manipulaing coordinates and evaluating potential energy and derivatives via straightforward means.
Tinker works on Windows, OS X, Linux and Unix. The source code is available free of charge under a restrictive license. The code is written in portable FORTRAN 77 with common extensions, and some C.
Development occurs at the Jay Ponder Lab, at the Department of Chemistry, Washington University in St. Louis, St. Louis, Missouri. Laboratory head Ponder is professor of chemistry (main appointment), biochemistry and molecular biophysics, and biomedical engineering.
Features
Programs are provided to perform many functions including:
- energy minimizing over Cartesian coordinates, torsional angles, or rigid bodies via conjugate gradient, variable metric or a truncated Newton method
- molecular, stochastic, and rigid body dynamics with periodic boundaries and control of temperature and pressure
- normal mode vibrational analysis
- distance geometry including an efficient random pairwise metrization
- building protein and nucleic acid structures from sequence
- simulated annealing with various cooling protocols
- analysis and breakdown of single point potential energies
- verification of analytical derivatives of standard and user defined potentials
- location of a transition state between two minima
- full energy surface search via a Conformation Scanning method
- free energy calculations via free energy perturbation or weighted histogram analysis
- fitting of intermolecular potential parameters to structural and thermodynamic data
- global optimizing via energy surface smoothing, including a Potential Smoothing and Search (PSS) method