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