Using an online database of chemical compounds for the purpose of structure identification
Online databases can be used for the purposes of structure identification. The Royal Society of Chemistry provides access to an online database containing tens of millions of compounds and this has been shown to be a very effective platform for the development of tools for structure identification. Since in many cases an unknown to an investigator is known in the chemical literature or reference database, these “known unknowns” are commonly available now on aggregated internet resources. The identification of these types of compounds in commercial, environmental, forensic, and natural product samples can be identified by searching against these large aggregated databases querying by either elemental composition or monoisotopic mass. Searching by elemental composition is the preferred approach as it is often difficult to determine a unique elemental composition for compounds with molecular weights greater than 600 Da. In these cases, searching by the monoisotopic mass is advantageous. In either case, the search results can be refined by appropriate filtering to identify the compounds. We will report on integrated filtering and search approaches on our aggregated compound database for the purpose of structure identification and review our progress in using the platform for natural product dereplication purposes.
