Prediction of Liquid Chromatographic Retention Time with Graph Neural Networks to Assist in Small Molecule Identification

The predicted liquid chromatographic retention times (RTs) of small molecules are not accurate enough for wide adoption in structural identification. In this study, we used the graph neural network to predict the retention time (GNN-RT) from structures of small molecules directly without the requirement of molecular descriptors. The predicted accuracy of GNN-RT was compared with random forests (RFs), Bayesian ridge regression, convolutional neural network (CNN), and a deep-learning regression model (DLM) on a METLIN small molecule retention time (SMRT) dataset. GNN-RT achieved the highest predicting accuracy with a mean relative error of 4.9% and a median relative error of 3.2%. Furthermore, the SMRT-trained GNN-RT model can be transferred to the same type of chromatographic systems easily. The predicted RT is valuable for structural identification in complementary to tandem mass spectra and can be used to assist in the identification of compounds. The results indicate that GNN-RT is a promising method to predict the RT for liquid chromatography and improve the accuracy of structural identification for small molecules.