Network Topology Evaluation and Transitive Alignments for Molecular Networking

Untargeted tandem mass spectrometry (MS/MS) is an essential technique in modern analytical chemistry, providing a comprehensive snapshot of chemical entities in complex samples and identifying unknowns through their fragmentation patterns. This high-throughput approach generates large data sets that can be challenging to interpret. Molecular Networks (MNs) have been developed as a computational tool to aid in the organization and visualization of complex chemical space in untargeted mass spectrometry data, thereby supporting comprehensive data analysis and interpretation. MNs group related compounds with potentially similar structures from MS/MS data by calculating all pairwise MS/MS similarities and filtering these connections to produce a MN. Such networks are instrumental in metabolomics for identifying novel metabolites, elucidating metabolic pathways, and even discovering biomarkers for disease. While MS/MS similarity metrics have been explored in the literature, the influence of network topology approaches on MN construction remains unexplored. This manuscript introduces metrics for evaluating MN construction, benchmarks state-of-the-art approaches, and proposes the Transitive Alignments approach to improve MN construction. The Transitive Alignment technique leverages the MN topology to realign MS/MS spectra of related compounds that differ by multiple structural modifications. Combining this Transitive Alignments approach with pseudoclique finding, a method for identifying highly connected groups of nodes in a network, resulted in more complete and higher-quality molecular families. Finally, we also introduce a targeted network construction technique called induced transitive alignments where we demonstrate effectiveness on a real world natural product discovery application. We release this transitive alignment technique as a high-throughput workflow that can be used by the wider research community.