%0 Journal Article
%T NITPICK: peak identification for mass spectrometry data
%A Bernhard Y Renard
%A Marc Kirchner
%A Hanno Steen
%A Judith AJ Steen
%A Fred A Hamprecht
%J BMC Bioinformatics
%D 2008
%I BioMed Central
%R 10.1186/1471-2105-9-355
%X This contribution proposes a sparse template regression approach to peak picking called NITPICK. NITPICK is a Non-greedy, Iterative Template-based peak PICKer that deconvolves complex overlapping isotope distributions in multicomponent mass spectra. NITPICK is based on fractional averagine, a novel extension to Senko's well-known averagine model, and on a modified version of sparse, non-negative least angle regression, for which a suitable, statistically motivated early stopping criterion has been derived. The strength of NITPICK is the deconvolution of overlapping mixture mass spectra.Extensive comparative evaluation has been carried out and results are provided for simulated and real-world data sets. NITPICK outperforms pepex, to date the only alternate, publicly available, non-greedy feature extraction routine. NITPICK is available as software package for the R programming language and can be downloaded from http://hci.iwr.uni-heidelberg.de/mip/proteomics/ webcite.The reliable extraction of proteomic features from complex biological mixtures is of utmost interest for unraveling the intricate biomolecular interplay at the heart of many systems biology research questions. In this context, mass spectrometry (MS) has become a key technology which provides peptide and protein identification, modification characterization and quantification capabilities. In contrast to gene expression microarray technologies, MS analysis yields a direct view on the whole set of proteins (the proteome) present in the system under investigation and can thus contribute to a richer picture of protein interaction, real-time dynamics and their regulation [1]. MS contributes to clinical research and the diagnosis process [2], it is used to detect, grade and characterize cancer diseases [3], it serves as a general purpose tool for microorganism characterization [4,5] and provides sensitive and specific means for pharmaceutical quality control.MS experiments typically contain tens to thousands
%U http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2105/9/355