A Structure-Based Deep Learning Framework for Correcting Marine Natural Products’ Misannotations Attributed to Host–Microbe Symbiosis

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Authors: Xiaohe Tian, Chuanyu Lyu, Yiran Zhou, Liangren Zhang, Aili Fan, Zhenming Liu
Cited by: 2
References: 33

Abstract

Marine natural products (MNPs) are a diverse group of bioactive compounds with varied chemical structures, but their biological origins are often misannotated due to complex host-microbe symbiosis. Propagated through public databases, such errors hinder biosynthetic studies and AI-driven drug discovery. Here, we develop a structure-based workflow of origin classification and misannotation correction for marine datasets. Using CMNPD and NPAtlas compounds, we integrate a two-step cleaning strategy that detects label inconsistencies and filters structural outliers with a microbial-pretrained graph neural network. The optimized model achieves a balanced accuracy of 85.56% and identifies 3996 compounds whose predicted microbial origins contradict their Animalia labels. These putative symbiotic metabolites cluster within known high-risk taxa, and interpretability analysis reveal biologically coherent structural patterns. This framework provides a scalable quality-control approach for natural product databases and supports more accurate biosynthetic gene cluster (BGC) tracing, host selection, and AI-driven marine natural product discovery.

Fields of Study & Subjects

Microbial Natural Products and Biosynthesis Machine Learning in Materials Science Genomics and Phylogenetic Studies

Publication details

Journal / source
Marine Drugs
Publisher
MDPI AG
Volume
24
Issue
1
Pages
20–20
Publication date
1 January 2026
Language
EN