Molecular networking as a natural products discovery strategy

The rapid development of bioinformatics tools has recently broken through the bottleneck in natural products research. These advances have enabled natural products researchers to rapidly separate and efficiently target and discover previously undescribed molecules. Among these advances, tandem mass spectrometry molecular networking is a promising method for rapidly de-replicating complex natural mixtures, thus leading to an accelerated revolution in the “art of natural products isolation” field. In this review we describe the current molecular networking-based metabolite analysis methods that are widely applied or implementable in natural products discovery research, metabolomics, and related fields. The main objective of this review was to summarize strategies that can be rapidly implemented as alternative de-replication approaches for efficient natural products discovery and to list examples of successful applications that combine networking with other techniques.