Surge: A Fast Open-Source Chemical Graph Generator

About

Surge is a chemical structure generator based on the Nauty package and thereby on the principles of canonical augmentation. More precisely, Surge generates all non-isomorphic constitutional isomers of a given molecular formula. Surge's article is published in Journal of Cheminformatics and more details are given in its user manual for more information.

Usage

Surge is a command line tool. Running surge -u C10H16O will generate the 452458 isomers of C₁₀H₁₆O in 0.1s on some vanilla flavor year-2021 PC. Running surge -S C10H16O outputs those structurs in SMILES format. You can either use surge -S C10H16O > myresults.smi to redirect the output into a result file, or use the -oswitch to provide a filename. Further formats supported are SD Files (SDF) and a concise Surge-specific format.
For large sets of structures, the -z option for compressing the output in gzip format will come in handy.

surge -help will show all options:

Usage: surge [-oFILE] [-z] [-u|-A|-S] [-T] [-e#|-e#:#] [-d#] [-c#] [-m#/#] formula

Make chemical graphs from a formula. Version 0.9.
Known elements are C,B,N,P,O,S,H,Cl,F,Br,I at their lowest valences.
Higher valences can be selected using Nx (Nitrogen/5), Sx,Sy (Sulfur 4/6), Px (Phosphorus/5).

formula = a formula like C8H6N2

  -E..  Define a new element (see the manual)
  -O#   Output stage: 1 after geng, 2 after vcolg, 3 after multig
        Default is to write SDF format
  -S    Output in SMILES format
  -A    Output in alphabetical format
  -u    Just count, don't write
  -e# -e#:#  Restrict to given range of distinct non-H bonds
  -t# -t#:#  Limit number of rings of length 3
  -f# -f#:#  Limit number of cycles of length 4
  -p# -p#:#  Limit number of cycles of length 5
  -b    Only rings of even length (same as only cycles of even length)
  -T    Disallow triple bonds
  -P    Require planarity
  -d#   Maximum degree not counting bond multiplicity or hydrogens (default 4)
  -c#   Maximum coordination number (default 4). This is the maximum number
        of distinct atoms (including H) that an atom can be bonded to
        Coordination number > 4 is only allowed if no neighbours are H
  -B#,...,# Specify sets of substructures to avoid (details in manual)
     1 = no triple bonds in rings up to length 7
     2 = Bredt's rule for two rings ij with one bond in
         common (33, 34, 35, 36, 44, 45)
     3 = Bredt's rule for two rings ij with two bonds in
         common (i,j up to 56)
     4 = Bredt's rule for two rings of length 6 sharing three bonds
     5 = no substructures A=A=A (in ring or not)
     6 = no substructures A=A=A in rings up to length 8
         For -B5 and -B6, the central atom only has 2 non-H neighbours
     7 = no K_33 or K_24 structure
     8 = none of cone of P4 or K4 with 3-ear
     9 = no atom in more than one ring of length 3 or 4
  -v     Write more information to stderr
  -m#/#  Do only a part. The two numbers are res/mod where 0<=res<mod.
  -oFILE Write the output to the given file rather than to stdout.
  -z     Write output in gzip format (only if compiled with zlib)

Installation

Option 1: Binary releases

Download one of the releases and run it.

Option 2: Build from source code

1. Download the latest Nauty release from http://users.cecs.anu.edu.au/~bdm/nauty/ and build it following the instrucations on the page.
2. Download surge.c from the source releases on this GitHub page and put it into the nauty folder
3. Compile using the instructions at the beginning of surge.c. The following works on Linux, MacOS as well as with the https://MSYS2.org Software Distribution and Building Platform for Windows. The latter was used to build the Windows release of Surge available on the release page .

gcc -o surge -O3 -DWORDSIZE=32 -DMAXN=WORDSIZE -DOUTPROC=surgeproc \
         -march=native -mtune=native -DPREPRUNE=surgepreprune \
         -DPRUNE=surgeprune -DGENG_MAIN=geng_main \
         surge.c geng.c planarity.c nautyW1.a

You can build-in gzip output using the zlib library (https://zlib.net). Add -DZLIB to the compilation, and link with the zlib library either by adding -lz or libz.a . This will activate the -z command to gzip the output :

gcc -o surge -O3 -DWORDSIZE=32 -DMAXN=WORDSIZE -DOUTPROC=surgeproc \
         -march=native -mtune=native -DPREPRUNE=surgepreprune -DZLIB \
         -DPRUNE=surgeprune -DGENG_MAIN=geng_main \
         surge.c geng.c planarity.c nautyW1.a -lz

Option 3: Use docker

First the container needs building:

docker build -t surge:latest .

Then it can be executed as follows:

docker run --rm -it surge:latest surge

Misc

Surge was developed by Brendan McKay with the help of Christoph Steinbeck and Mehmet Aziz Yirik.