Deep MS/MS-Aided Structural-Similarity Scoring for Unknown Metabolite Identification

Tandem mass spectrometry (MS/MS) is the workhorse for structural annotation of metabolites, because it can provide abundance of structural information. Currently, metabolite identification mainly relies on querying experimental spectra against public or in-house spectral databases. The identification is severely limited by the available spectra in the databases. Although, the metabolome consists of a huge number of different functional metabolites, the whole metabolome derives from a limited number of initial metabolites via bioreactions. In each bioreaction, the reactant and the product often change some substructures but are still structurally related. These structurally related metabolites often have related MS/MS spectra, which provide the possibility to identify unknown metabolites through known ones. However, it is challenging to explore the internal relationship between MS/MS spectra and structural similarity. In this study, we present the deep-learning-based approach for MS/MS-aided structural-similarity scoring (DeepMASS), which can score the structural similarity of unknown metabolite against the known one with MS/MS spectra and deep neural networks. We evaluated DeepMASS with leave-one-out cross-validation on MS/MS spectra of 662 compounds in KEGG and an external test on the biomarkers from male infertility study measured on Shimadzu LC-ESI-IT-TOF and Bruker Compact LC-ESI-QTOF. Results show that the identification of unknown compound is valid if its structure-related metabolite is available in the database. It provides an effective approach to extend the identification range of metabolites for existing MS/MS databases.