AUDENS: a tool for automated peptide de novo sequencing.

We present AUDENS, a new platform-independent open source tool for automated de novo sequencing of peptides from MS/MS data. We implemented a dynamic programming algorithm and combined it with a flexible preprocessing module which is designed to distinguish between signal and other peaks. By applying a user-defined set of heuristics, AUDENS screens through the spectrum and assigns high relevance values to putative signal peaks. The algorithm constructs a sequence path through the MS/MS spectrum using the peak relevances to score each suggested sequence path, i.e., the corresponding amino acid sequence. At present, we consider AUDENS a prototype that unfolds its biggest potential if used in parallel with other de novo sequencing tools. AUDENS is available open source and can be downloaded with further documentation at http://www.ti.inf.ethz.ch/pw/software/audens/ .