Identification of the 1H-NMR spectra of complex oligosaccharides with artificial neural networks

Artificial networks can be used to identify hydrogen nuclear magnetic resonance (1H-NMR) spectra of complex oligosaccharides. Feed-forward neural networks with back-propagation of errors can distinguish between spectra of oligosaccharides that differ by only one glycosyl residue in twenty. The artificial neural networks use features of the strongly overlapping region of the spectra (hump region) as well as features of the resolved regions of the spectra (structural reporter groups) to recognize spectra and efficiently recognized 1H-NMR spectra even when the spectra were perturbed by minor variations in their chemical shifts. Identification of spectra by neural network-based pattern recognition techniques required less than 0.1 second. It is anticipated that artificial neural networks can be used to identify the structures of any complex carbohydrate that has been previously characterized and for which a 1H-NMR spectrum is available.