mineMS2: annotation of spectral libraries with exact fragmentation patterns

Identification is a major challenge in metabolomics due to the large structural diversity of metabolites. Tandem mass spectrometry is a reference technology for studying the fragmentation of molecules and characterizing their structure. Recent instruments can fragment large amounts of compounds in a single acquisition. The search for similarities within a collection of MS/MS spectra is a powerful approach to facilitate the identification of new metabolites. We propose an innovative de novo strategy for searching for exact fragmentation patterns within collections of MS/MS spectra. This approach is based on (i) a new representation of spectra as graphs of m/z differences, and (ii) an efficient frequent-subgraph mining algorithm. We demonstrate both on a spectral database from standards and on acquisitions in biological matrices that these new fragmentation patterns capture similarities that are not extracted by existing methods, and facilitate the structural interpretation of molecular network components and the elucidation of unknown spectra. The mineMS2 software is publicly available as an R package (https://github.com/odisce/mineMS2).

We present an innovative strategy for structural elucidation, which extracts exact fragmentation patterns of m/z differences within collections of MS/MS spectra. The algorithms are implemented in a software library enabling efficient mining of MS/MS data and coupling to molecular networks. We show on real datasets the specific value of the patterns as fragmentation graphs for structural interpretation and de novo identification, and their complementarity to existing approaches.