An evaluation of spherical designs for molecular-like surfaces

The use of spherical harmonics in the molecular sciences is widespread. They have been employed with success in, for instance, the crystallographic fast rotation function, small-angle scattering particle reconstruction, molecular surface visualisation, protein–protein docking, active site analysis and protein function prediction. The calculation of spherical harmonic expansion coefficients requires integration over the full sphere and can be a computationally cumbersome and also numerically sensitive (with respect to the integration weights) procedure. It is shown here how the use of spherical t-designs and pre-computed near-equal weight integration layouts can significantly reduce the computational effort in the determination of spherical harmonic expansion coefficients for molecular surfaces, thus giving rise to a robust and highly efficient algorithm for the construction of molecular-like objects.