Mass spectrometry tools for screening of marine cyanobacterial natural products

The marine environment is an extraordinarily rich source of natural products. Here we employed tandem mass spectrometry tools to screen a large-scale dataset from a worldwide collection of marine cyanobacteria, aiming to visualize and map the chemical universe of their metabolites. Molecular networking was utilized to cluster molecules into families based on fragmentation similarities that enabled the dereplication of known compounds, the identification of new derivatives and targeting of novel natural products. Molecular features captured by mass spectrometry were subjected to geographical mapping, revealing the chemical distribution of these natural products and highlighting chemodiversity “hotspots” for potential new chemistries.

Fig. 1: Mapping the distribution of Apratoxins molecular family [M+Na]⁺ using GNPS molecular networking and “LCMS 2D/3D toolbox”.