Shahaf, N. et al. Nat. Commun. 7, 12423 (2016).

Mass-spectrometry-based studies aimed at the discovery of small-molecule metabolites in biological systems rely on the use of spectral libraries for interpretation of experimental spectra. These libraries are generated using authentic standard compounds. But such spectral libraries, especially those covering plant metabolites, are woefully incomplete; as a result, only a very small fraction of the total estimated number of metabolites can be identified in metabolomics studies. Shahaf et al. now present WEIZMASS, a spectral library generated from high-resolution mass spectrometry data for 3,540 structurally diverse plant metabolites. They also describe MatchWeiz, a software tool used to match experimental spectra to the library spectra for identification. Using this approach, the researchers identified metabolites in three plant species from the Lemnaceae family, the tomato plant, and the model plant Arabidopsis.