HiXCorr: a portable high-speed X-Corr engine for high-resolution tandem mass spectrometry

Abstract

Peptide identification is an important problem in proteomics. One of the most popular scoring schemes for peptide identification is X-Corr (cross-correlation). Since calculating X-Corr is computationally intensive, a lot of efforts have been made to develop fast X-Corr engines. However, the existing X-Corr engines are not suitable for high-resolution MS/MS spectrometry because they are either slow or require a specific type of CPU. We present a portable high-speed X-Corr engine for high-resolution tandem mass spectrometry by developing a novel algorithm for calculating X-Corr. The algorithm enables X-Corr calculation 1.25-49 times faster than previous algorithms for 0.01 Da fragment tolerance. Furthermore, our engine is easily portable to any machine with different types of CPU because it is developed in C language. Hence, our X-Corr engine will expedite peptide identification by high-resolution tandem mass spectrometry.