MUCHA: multiple chemical alignment algorithm to identify building block substructures of orphan secondary metabolites

摘要

BackgroundIn contrast to the increasing number of the successful genome projects, there still remain many orphan metabolites for which their synthesis processes are unknown. Metabolites, including these orphan metabolites, can be classified into groups that share the same core substructures, originated from the same biosynthetic pathways. It is known that many metabolites are synthesized by adding up building blocks to existing metabolites. Therefore, it is proposed that, for any given group of metabolites, finding the core substructure and the branched substructures can help predict their biosynthetic pathway. There already have been many reports on the multiple graph alignment techniques to find the conserved chemical substructures in relatively small molecules. However, they are optimized for ligand binding and are not suitable for metabolomic studies.