Discovering peptidic natural products by integrating computational mass spectrometry and genome mining

Peptidic natural products (PNP) are a major source of signal molecules and drug leads [1]. The existing techniques for PNP discovery require isolation of bioactive molecules and structure elucidation, which are time consuming and expensive. Recent advances in high-throughput mass spectrometry (MS) and next generation sequencing has resulted in large MS/genomic datasets, which are gold mines for PNP discovery. However, currently there is no efficient algorithm to mine these datasets. We have developed computational tools to integrate MS/genomic data for automated discovery of PNPs from environmental isolates/communities.