Critical Assessment of Data-Driven versus Heuristic Reaction Coordinates in Solution Chemistry

Reaction coordinates are an essential ingredient of theoretical studies of rare events in chemistry and physics because they carry information about reaction mechanism and allow the computation of free-energy landscapes and kinetic rates. We present a critical assessment of the merits and disadvantages of heuristic reaction coordinates, largely employed today, with respect to coordinates optimized on the basis of reliable transition-path sampling data. We take as a test bed multinanosecond ab initio molecular dynamics simulations of chloride S_N2 substitution on methyl chloride in explicit water. The computational protocol we devise allows the unsupervised optimization of agnostic coordinates able to account for solute and solvent contributions, yielding a free-energy reconstruction of quality comparable to the best heuristic coordinates without requiring chemical intuition.