GNPS - a Preview of the Future of Community Wide Collaboration and the Power of Social Networking in Mass Spectrometry

We propose a new platform, Global Natural Product Social Molecular Networking (GNPS) that enables collaborative curation of the world’s natural product data as well as new tools that organize and visualize (through molecular networks) natural product datasets on unheard of scales. While GNPS is branded to solely target the natural product community, it serves as a pilot project to demonstrate the feasibility and utility of a collaborative crowd sourced knowledge base and analysis platform. To facilitate quick adoption, the GNPS platform is provided via a web interface, through which, users can contribute known compounds and give/receive feedback to/from others in order to resolve possible inaccuracies in annotation in a wikipedia-like fashion. Additionally, the platform provides powerful informatics tools for identifcation that leverages this curated knowledge base. The tools and knowledge base available at GNPS have not only enabled the discovery of novel natural products, but also have shown promise in identifying novel glycopeptides as well as other unexpected PTMs. The capabilities available at GNPS give us just a glimpse at what will be available in the proteomics world in short order. Researches will be able to enrich and leverage a shared knowledge base and also have the ability to compare and contrast their own data against all available data, finally leveraging the public data and giving it a second life.