ModiFinder: Tandem Mass Spectral Alignment Enables Structural Modification Site Localization

Untargeted tandem mass spectrometry (MS/MS) has become a high-throughput method to measure small molecules in complex samples. One key goal is the transformation of these MS/MS spectra into chemical structures. Computational techniques such as MS/MS library search have enabled the re-identification of known compounds. Analog library search and molecular networking extend this identification to unknown compounds. While there have been advancements in metrics for the similarity of MS/MS spectra of structurally similar compounds, there is still a lack of automated methods to provide site specific information about structural modifications. Here we introduce ModiFinder that leverages the alignment of peaks in MS/MS spectra between structurally related known and unknown small molecules. Specifically, ModiFinder focuses on shifted MS/MS fragment peaks in the MS/MS alignment. These shifted peaks putatively represent substructures of the known molecule that contain the site of the modification. ModiFinder synthesizes these information together and scores the likelihood for each atom in the known molecule to be the modification site. We demonstrate in this manuscript how ModiFinder can effectively localize modifications which extends the capabilities of MS/MS analog searching and molecular networking to accelerate the discovery of novel compounds.