Related Experiment Video
Updated: Jul 23, 2025

Mass Spectrometry-Guided Genome Mining as a Tool to Uncover Novel Natural Products
Published on: March 12, 2020
HypoRiPPAtlas as an Atlas of hypothetical natural products for mass spectrometry database search
Yi-Yuan Lee1,2, Mustafa Guler1, Desnor N Chigumba3
1Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, 15213, USA.
Abstract:
Recent analyses of public microbial genomes have found over a million biosynthetic gene clusters, the natural products of the majority of which remain unknown. Additionally, GNPS harbors billions of mass spectra of natural products without known structures and biosynthetic genes. We bridge the gap between large-scale genome mining and mass spectral datasets for natural product discovery by developing HypoRiPPAtlas, an Atlas of hypothetical natural product structures, which is ready-to-use for in silico database search of tandem mass spectra. HypoRiPPAtlas is constructed by mining genomes using seq2ripp, a machine-learning tool for the prediction of ribosomally synthesized and post-translationally modified peptides (RiPPs). In HypoRiPPAtlas, we identify RiPPs in microbes and plants. HypoRiPPAtlas could be extended to other natural product classes in the future by implementing corresponding biosynthetic logic. This study paves the way for large-scale explorations of biosynthetic pathways and chemical structures of microbial and plant RiPP classes.

