Professor Mingxun Wang, in collaboration with an interdisciplinary team from UCSD, published a new paper in Nature titled "Reverse metabolomics for the discovery of chemical structures from humans". This highly interdisciplinary work combines innovations from combinatorial chemistry, mass spectrometry, and big data mining to explore new molecular space. While the discovery of new molecules is generally a laborious task, where a single molecule can take months to discover, here we realize the high throughput discovery of thousands of human gut microbiome molecules. The authors combine the ability of combinatorial chemistry to generate tens of thousands of new compounds with high-performance algorithms that index all public data from human gut microbiomes to find new molecules that are relevant in the human gut. This work sets the stage for future work to understand how these molecules can regulate health and disease. 

More details can be found in the full manuscript - https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06906-8