A Structure-Guided Molecular Network Strategy for Global Untargeted Metabolomics Data Annotation

Large-scale metabolite annotation is a bottleneck in untargeted metabolomics. Here, we present a structure-guided molecular network strategy (SGMNS) for deep annotation of untargeted ultra-performance liquid chromatography-high resolution mass spectrometry (MS) metabolomics data. Different from the current network-based metabolite annotation method, SGMNS is based on a global connectivity molecular network (GCMN), which was constructed by molecular fingerprint similarity of chemical structures in metabolome databases. Neighbor metabolites with similar structures in GCMN are expected to produce similar spectra. Network annotation propagation of SGMNS is performed using known metabolites as seeds. The experimental MS/MS spectra of seeds are assigned to corresponding neighbor metabolites in GCMN as their “pseudo” spectra; the propagation is done by searching predicted retention times, MS 1, and “pseudo” spectra against metabolite features in untargeted metabolomics data. Then, the annotated metabolite features were used as new seeds for annotation propagation again. Performance evaluation of SGMNS showed its unique advantages for metabolome annotation. The developed method was applied to annotate six typical biological samples; a total of 701, 1557, 1147, 1095, 1237, and 2041 metabolites were annotated from the cell, feces, plasma (NIST SRM 1950), tissue, urine, and their pooled sample, respectively, and the annotation accuracy was >83% with RSD <2%. The results show that SGMNS fully exploits the chemical space of the existing metabolomes for metabolite deep annotation and overcomes the shortcoming of insufficient reference MS/MS spectra.