Lignonaut: designing diverse combinatorial libraries for the exploration and annotation of lignin oligomer spaces

Lignins are a polymeric, renewable resource with remarkable structural diversity. Research is being conducted into the valorisation of lignins into value-added products. The absence of experimental libraries, in particular for process-modified oligomers, hampers analytical feedback to these valorisation efforts. Stochastic methods for generating libraries in-silico have been proposed, but were not designed for use with popular techniques such as high-resolution mass spectrometry. To resolve this, we developed Lignonaut, which is a toolkit for designing lignin libraries through virtual combinatorial synthesis. To ensure high interpretability we also developed new, diversity-oriented nomenclature for lignin oligomers, upon which an efficient SMILES translation algorithm could be built. Libraries of up to 10⁷ oligomers could be generated, in linear time, and at a rate of 10⁶ per minute. Scientific contributionLignonaut applies virtual combinatorial synthesis to exhaustively map lignin chemical spaces for e.g. high-resolution mass spectrometry. It is fast and can account for the high degree of isomerism in lignin oligomers, which were major limitations of previous stochastic approaches.