无需分子式即可从质谱图直接解析分子结构,突破传统方法依赖已知公式的瓶颈。
MARLIN: De Novo Molecular Structure Elucidation from Tandem Mass Spectra without a Ground-Truth Formula

- 通过自监督编码器和块扩散语言模型,直接从质谱峰生成候选结构
- 在无公式条件下实现90%以上精确匹配率,且结构距离与指纹相似度领先
- 适合新药研发、生物标志物发现等未知化合物探索场景
非靶向串联质谱每样本可检测数千种小分子,但多数因未收录于光谱库而无法识别。这些未表征的代谢物和天然产物正是药物发现、生物标志物研究和暴露组学的关键。计算去新结构解析可填补此空白,但现有方法几乎都假设已知真实分子式,而这一前提对真正新化合物并不存在,且预测本身误差显著。我们提出MARLIN,一种无需任何阶段使用真实分子式的去新结构解析方法。其自监督编码器从原始质谱峰预测分子指纹,块扩散语言模型仅基于指纹和仪器测量的前体质量生成候选结构。一个可证明安全的质量壳约束确保所有候选结构与实测质量一致,无需固定原子组成;候选结构通过精确的百万分之一级质量吻合接受。对称噪声目标吸收编码误差,候选多样性机制防止结果坍缩为单一结构。在NPLIB1基准上,MARLIN在无真实分子式条件下,于精确匹配率、结构距离和指纹相似度三项指标均优于现有最强方法,并能以与专用预测器相当的频率恢复正确分子式,却从未使用过分子式。MARLIN实现了在真实发现场景下可靠的去新结构解析。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Untargeted tandem mass spectrometry (MS/MS) detects thousands of small molecules per biological sample, yet most go unidentified because they are absent from spectral libraries. These uncharacterized metabolites and natural products are precisely the compounds that matter for drug discovery, biomarker research, and exposomics. Computational de novo structure elucidation could close this gap, but almost all state-of-the-art methods assume the ground-truth molecular formula is known, an oracle that does not exist for genuinely novel compounds and is itself predicted with substantial error. We present MARLIN, a de novo method that elucidates structures directly from a spectrum with no molecular formula at any stage. A self-supervised encoder predicts a molecular fingerprint from the raw peaks, and a block-diffusion language model generates candidate structures conditioned only on the fingerprint and the instrument-measured precursor mass. A provably safe mass-shell constraint keeps every candidate consistent with the measured mass without fixing the atom inventory, and candidates are accepted by exact parts-per-million mass agreement. A symmetric noise objective absorbs encoder error, and a candidate-diversity mechanism keeps the candidates from collapsing to a single structure. On the NPLIB1 benchmark, MARLIN is the strongest method evaluated without a ground-truth formula across exact-match accuracy, structural distance, and fingerprint similarity, and it recovers the correct molecular formula as a byproduct about as often as a dedicated predictor without ever using one. MARLIN enables reliable de novo structure elucidation in the realistic discovery regime where the molecular formula is unavailable.
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