ComplexMixtures is a Julia package to study the solute and solvent interactions of mixtures of molecules of complex shape. Conventional radial distribution functions are not appropriate to represent the structure of a solvent around a solute with many atoms, and a variable, non-spherical shape.
Typical solutes of complex shape are proteins, nucleic acids, and polymers in general. Smaller molecules like lipids, carbohydrates, etc, are also complex enough such that representing the structure of the solution of those molecules with distribution functions is not trivial.
Minimum-Distance Distribution Functions (MDDFs) are a very general and practical way to represent solute-solvent interactions for molecules with arbitrarily complex sizes and geometries. Briefly, instead of computing the density distribution function of a particular atom or the center-of-mass of the molecules, one computes the distribution function of the minimum-distance between any solute and solvent atoms. This provides a size and shape-independent distribution which is very natural to interpret in terms of molecular interactions.
Availability: http://m3g.iqm.unicamp.br/ComplexMixtures