While nonribosomal peptides (NRPs) are of tremendous pharmacological importance, there is currently no technology capable
of high-throughput sequencing of NRPs. Difficulties in sequencing NRPs slow down the progress in elucidating the non-ribosomal
genetic code and negatively affect various screening programs aimed at the discovery of natural compounds of medical importance.
We propose to employ multi-stage mass-spectrometry (MS
n
) for the data acquisition, followed by alignment-based heuristic algorithms for data analysis. Since mass spectrometry based
analysis of NRPs is fast and inexpensive, this approach opens the possibility of high-throughput sequencing of many unknown
NRPs accumulated in large screening programs.
Keywords Cyclic Peptides - Sequencing - De novo Algorithm