PLACER (Protein-Ligand Atomistic Conformational Ensemble Resolver) was proposed in November 2025 by a research team led by Professor David Baker at the University of Washington. The related research findings were published in the paper "..."Modeling protein-small molecule conformational ensembles with PLACER".

PLACER is a graph neural network that can accurately generate structures of various small organic molecules based on knowledge of their atomic composition and bonding. Given a larger description of the protein environment, it can also construct small molecule and protein side chain structures for protein-small molecule docking. PLACER will be widely applicable to the rapid generation of conformational sets of small molecules and small molecule-protein systems, as well as the design of pre-organized enzymes with higher activity.