Mapping the molecular universe of marine cyanobacterial natural products

For the past several decades, the marine environment had proven to be an extraordinarily rich source of natural products. As such, it holds fascinating, yet unanswered questions on where and what compounds are produced, if they are specific to a certain niche or are more widely distributed? Here, we have employed mass spectrometry tools to produce a large-scale dataset from a worldwide collection of marine cyanobacteria, aiming to capture a more global view of the chemical universe and dispersal patterns of their metabolites. To achieve this, thousands of standardized chromatography fractions from a library of extracts were analyzed by Q-TOF LC/MS/MS. Molecular networking was utilized to cluster molecular families based on fragmentation similarities which allowed for the dereplication of known compounds and the identification of new derivatives. This molecular information was also subjected to 2D global mapping based on metadata and the origin of the samples, revealing the chemical distribution of these natural products as well as highlighting chemodiversity “hotspots” and the potential for super-producers.