Harnessing molecular networking for high throughput screening for marine specialized metabolites

The marine environment is a relatively less explored niche which has great prospective as a source for natural products and specialized metabolites with vast therapeutic potential. Here, a high throughput molecular networking was utilized to characterize chemical similarities and diversities in the metabolome of multiple cyanobacteria collections originated from various geographical locations across the equatorial. We have analyzed hundreds of extracts using Q-TOF LC/MS/MS and clustered them based on fragmentation similarities, to generate a molecular network that can correlate the chemical characteristics to the geographical distribution. The powerful tool of molecular networking enabled the seeding of pure compound and detects analogs dispersal across the globe. This data would have great impact on focusing the search of target metabolites and its derivatives, facilitating the discovery of new active chemicals.