MSDash: mass spectrometry database and search.

Along with the wide application of mass spectrometry in proteomics, more and more mass spectrometry data are becoming publicly available. Several public mass spectrometry data repositories have been built on the Internet. However, most of these repositories are devoid of effective searching methods. In this paper we describe a new mass spectrometry data library, and a novel method to efficiently index and search in the library for spectra that are similar to a query spectrum. A public online server have been set up and demonstrated outstanding speed and scalability of our methods. Together with the mass spectrometry library, our searching method can improve the protein identification confidence by comparing a spectrum with the ones that are already characterized in the database. The searching method can also be used alone to cluster the similar spectra in a mass spectrometry dataset together, in order to to improve the speed and accuracy of the protein identification or quantification.