Skip to main content

Fullerene Layout with Spokes and Arches

Having tried (and failed) to layout fullerene structures using various optimisation methods, I thought I would try direct positioning of the atoms. In other words, 'logical' placement rather than 'physics' based layout. For example:



These are two regular fullerenes that work very well. The algorithm is simple in principle:

1) Given a planar embedding G, calculate the inner dual id(G) and the 'face layers'.
2) The innermost layer is the 'core' which is one of: a single vertex, a connected pair, or a cycle.
3) Layout the core, and then each layer outwards, by spoke and arch.

So, to explain some of this; a 'face layer' is a set of faces all at the same distance from the outer cycle, measured by graph distance on id(G). So the faces adjacent to the outer cycle are the first layer, and the second layer is adjacent to that, and so on. This is roughly illustrated here:


The concentric circles represent the layers of faces, with the innermost being the core. On the right is a cartoon of two spokes on an outer path, connected by a dashed line to show the arch. The outer path starts off as the edges around the core, and is replaced by the arches of the next level.

This method does work - it creates diagrams that are not too horrible - but does not give as good results for the less-symmetric examples. Something like Bojan Mohar's circle-packing method would probably be better, or even a properly implemented spring layout...

Here are some final examples, all with paired-cores:

(The colors are signature classes, by the way. All images made using CDK's new classes. Code here).

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Adamantane, Diamantane, Twistane

After cubane, the thought occurred to look at other regular hydrocarbons. If only there was some sort of classification of chemicals that I could use look up similar structures. Oh wate, there is . Anyway, adamantane is not as regular as cubane, but it is highly symmetrical, looking like three cyclohexanes fused together. The vertices fall into two different types when colored by signature: The carbons with three carbon neighbours (degree-3, in the simple graph) have signature (a) and the degree-2 carbons have signature (b). Atoms of one type are only connected to atoms of another - the graph is bipartite . Adamantane connects together to form diamondoids (or, rather, this class have adamantane as a repeating subunit). One such is diamantane , which is no longer bipartite when colored by signature: It has three classes of vertex in the simple graph (a and b), as the set with degree-3 has been split in two. The tree for signature (c) is not shown. The graph is still bipartite accordin

Király's Method for Generating All Graphs from a Degree Sequence

After posting about the Hakimi-Havel  theorem, I received a nice email suggesting various relevant papers. One of these was by Zoltán Király  called " Recognizing Graphic Degree Sequences and Generating All Realizations ". I have now implemented a sketch of the main idea of the paper, which seems to work reasonably well, so I thought I would describe it. See the paper for details, of course. One focus of Király's method is to generate graphs efficiently , by which I mean that it has polynomial delay. In turn, an algorithm with 'polynomial delay' takes a polynomial amount of time between outputs (and to produce the first output). So - roughly - it doesn't take 1s to produce the first graph, 10s for the second, 2s for the third, 300s for the fourth, and so on. Central to the method is the tree that is traversed during the search for graphs that satisfy the input degree sequence. It's a little tricky to draw, but looks something like this: At the top

1,2-dichlorocyclopropane and a spiran

As I am reading a book called "Symmetry in Chemistry" (H. H. Jaffé and M. Orchin) I thought I would try out a couple of examples that they use. One is 1,2-dichlorocylopropane : which is, apparently, dissymmetric because it has a symmetry element (a C2 axis) but is optically active. Incidentally, wedges can look horrible in small structures - this is why: The box around the hydrogen is shaded in grey, to show the effect of overlap. A possible fix might be to shorten the wedge, but sadly this would require working out the bounds of the text when calculating the wedge, which has to be done at render time. Oh well. Another interesting example is this 'spiran', which I can't find on ChEBI or ChemSpider: Image again courtesy of JChempaint . I guess the problem marker (the red line) on the N suggests that it is not a real compound? In any case, some simple code to determine potential chiral centres (using signatures) finds 2 in the cyclopropane structure, and 4 in the