Iodine-Containing Mass-Defect-Tuned Dendrimers for Use as Internal Mass Spectrometry Calibrants.

Calibrants based on synthetic dendrimers have been recently proposed as a versatile alternative to peptides and proteins for both MALDI and ESI mass spectrometry calibration. Because of their modular synthetic platform, dendrimer calibrants are particularly amenable to tailoring for specific applications. Utilizing this versatility, a set of dendrimers has been designed as an internal calibrant with a tailored mass defect to differentiate them from the majority of natural peptide analytes. This was achieved by incorporating a tris-iodinated aromatic core as an initiator for the dendrimer synthesis, thereby affording multiple calibration points (m/z range 600-2300) with an optimized mass-defect offset relative to all peptides composed of the 20 most common proteinogenic amino acids. Graphical abstract ᅟ.

Crux: rapid open source protein tandem mass spectrometry analysis.

Efficiently and accurately analyzing big protein tandem mass spectrometry data sets requires robust software that incorporates state-of-the-art computational, machine learning, and statistical methods. The Crux mass spectrometry analysis software toolkit ( http://cruxtoolkit.sourceforge.net ) is an open source project that aims to provide users with a cross-platform suite of analysis tools for interpreting protein mass spectrometry data.

Faster SEQUEST searching for peptide identification from tandem mass spectra.

Computational analysis of mass spectra remains the bottleneck in many proteomics experiments. SEQUEST was one of the earliest software packages to identify peptides from mass spectra by searching a database of known peptides. Though still popular, SEQUEST performs slowly. Crux and TurboSEQUEST have successfully sped up SEQUEST by adding a precomputed index to the search, but the demand for ever-faster peptide identification software continues to grow. Tide, introduced here, is a software program that implements the SEQUEST algorithm for peptide identification and that achieves a dramatic speedup over Crux and SEQUEST. The optimization strategies detailed here employ a combination of algorithmic and software engineering techniques to achieve speeds up to 170 times faster than a recent version of SEQUEST that uses indexing. For example, on a single Xeon CPU, Tide searches 10,000 spectra against a tryptic database of 27,499 Caenorhabditis elegans proteins at a rate of 1550 spectra per second, which compares favorably with a rate of 8.8 spectra per second for a recent version of SEQUEST with index running on the same hardware.