In RdKit, the method SetProp is used to set an atomic property for the atoms involved in the molecule. This method takes two arguments: the peroperty to set and its value. The idea is simple: Create an rdkit mol object from SMILES string, iterate over the atoms, and set the desired property to a custom value.

For this article, we’ll look at three different ways to show atom numbers. We’ll take the example of Benzamide to show the modifications.

First of all import the necessary packages:

from rdkit import Chem
from rdkit.Chem.Draw import IPythonConsole

1. Atom numbers along with the atoms

To show atom numbers along with the atom symbols, we need to set the molAtomMapNumber property of the atoms.

# Create an rdkit mol object
mol = Chem.MolFromSmiles('c1ccccc(C(N)=O)1')

# Iterate over the atoms
for i, atom in enumerate(mol.GetAtoms()):
    # For each atom, set the property "molAtomMapNumber" to a custom number, let's say, the index of the atom in the molecule
    atom.SetProp("molAtomMapNumber", str(atom.GetIdx()+1))

mol

And the molecule, now, will look like:

2. Custom labels in place of the atoms

If you want to replace the atom symbols with a custom value, set the atomLabel property of the atoms to a desired value.

# Create an rdkit mol object
mol = Chem.MolFromSmiles('c1ccccc(C(N)=O)1')

# Iterate over the atoms
for i, atom in enumerate(mol.GetAtoms()):
    # For each atom, set the property "atomLabel" to a custom value, let's say a1, a2, a3,...
    atom.SetProp("atomLabel", f"a{i+1}")

mol

The molecule will change as:

3. Atom numbers on top of the atoms

Both the previous methods have two issues: First, it can become overly crowded at times when adding the atom numbers and second, the visual appeal goes away. A better way to annotate the atoms is by showing the numbers separate from the atomic symbols. To achieve this, set the atomNote property of the atoms.

# Create an rdkit mol object
mol = Chem.MolFromSmiles('c1ccccc(C(N)=O)1')

# Iterate over the atoms
for atom in mol.GetAtoms():
    # For each atom, set the property "atomNote" to a index+1 of the atom
    atom.SetProp("atomNote", str(atom.GetIdx()+1))

mol

And we’ll get a much cleaner look for the molecule:

Summary

In this article, we saw three different ways to annotate atoms in RdKit. The annotation doesn’t have to be a number but can be any label. This method is also useful when you want to annotate only a selected atoms. Let’s say that you want to mark only the Nitrogen atom with a label, say Nitrogen. You can achieve this as follows:

mol = Chem.MolFromSmiles('c1ccccc(C(N)=O)1')
for atom in mol.GetAtoms():
    if atom.GetSymbol() == "N":
        atom.SetProp("atomNote", "Nitrogen")
mol

And that’s it for this article. If you have any doubts/suggestions/criticism, feel free to post them in the comments. Until next time.