Charting the small-molecule universe from mass spectra with neuro-symbolic AI

Authors

Acikalin, U. U., Feng, D., Ferber, A. M., Gouveia, G. J., Schwertfeger, T. J., Chen, D., Qu, D., Fontaine, M. A., Wang, Y., Bernstein, R. A., Wang, H., Won, T.-H., Parkhurst, C. N., Selman, B., Artis, D., Schroeder, F. C., Gomes, C. P.

Abstract

Mass spectrometry (MS) has revealed millions of small organic molecules across organisms, yet most remain uncharacterized, limiting progress in biology and medicine. Despite computational advances, MS workflows rely heavily on expert input and reference libraries that cover only a fraction of known chemical space. Here, we introduce AIMe (AI Molecule Explorer), a multi-agent neuro-symbolic AI framework that transforms the interpretation of unknown spectra into an omics-scale exploration across the known structural space, providing chemically interpretable annotations. At its core, AIMe combines chemical reasoning with structure-informed learning to predict MS2 spectra by modeling fragmentation as a sequence of actions, outperforming existing methods. AIMe dynamically constructs fragmentation pathways by assigning likelihoods to individual fragmentation actions, linking spectral peaks to explicit fragment molecular formulas and structures. At scale, AIMe predicted MS2 spectra for over 100 million small organic molecules in PubChem and organized them into MS2KOSMOS, a substructure-informed community resource comprising over 800 million predicted spectra that expands the searchable small-molecule universe by roughly three orders of magnitude relative to experimental libraries. Analogous to sequence homology-based searches in genomics and proteomics, AIMe maps unknown spectra to molecular neighborhoods in MS2KOSMOS. Exact-formula indexing enables ranked retrieval of candidates and related structures, with peak-level structural and fragmentation-pathway annotations. Applied to mouse microbiota-dependent metabolites, AIMe enabled putative annotation of knowns and guided structure elucidation of unknowns, revealing previously unreported types of microbiota-dependent polyamines that also occur in humans. At repository scale, AIMe enabled putative annotation of roughly a third of 7 million spectral clusters representing most of the unknowns in the GNPS database. By extending MS2 annotation beyond curated-library matching to interpretable search across the known small-molecule universe, AIMe accelerates discovery and large-scale exploration of small molecules across biomedicine, agriculture, and ecology.

Preprint server: bioRxiv
The authors list and abstract were imported from bioRxiv on 07 Aug 2026.

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