A new vision in Mass Spectrometry Imaging

Proteomics techniques have evolved dramatically over the last ten years and have reached a level of maturity. Most current proteomics experiments are aimed at the quantitative profiling of proteins in complex mixtures using high-resolution separations (such as liquid chromatography (LC), capillary electrophoresis or 1D- and 2D-PAGE) followed by mass spectrometry (MS). MS is increasingly used after the separation step to acquire peptide mass and sequence data at a high sampling rate, producing datasets that are highly correlated. Considering that a single dataset can produce thousands of mass spectrum, a high demand has been raised for tools allowing to efficiently assess the quality and reproducibility from these high-throughput data (often over 100 Mbytes).

MSight, created by the Proteome Informatics Group, was specifically developed for the representation of mass spectra along with data from the separation step. The software allows graphical exploration inside huge dataset and gives the scientist access to information that previously was hidden. The software is described in the following paper published in the journal Proteomics (2005; 5: 2381-2384).

Version 1.0 of this software is distributed free of charge.

Key features:

• Fast multi-resolution visualisation of the data as an image ensuring seamless transition from a global overview of all spectra to selected isotopic peaks.
• User-friendly navigation through large volume of data.
• Visualization tools to discriminate peptide or protein from noise.
• Differential proteome analysis by comparing several sets of data, providing fast and intuitive detection of significant qualitative and quantitative differences.
• Assessment of the data quality and the experimental design is simplified by providing a direct means to verify key aspects, such as the quality of the separation, the presence of artefacts and contaminants or mass calibration problems.
• Read MS and MS/MS files generated by the majority of mass spectrometers.

Examples are worth than long explanation

• Screenshot
• Display Principle
• Zooming examples
• Time correlation, Chromatogram
• Differential display

Version 1.0

This version 1.0 introduces some major improvements:

• Generated images size has been strongly reduced and memory requirements also.
• Extended support for MS and MS/MS.
• Enhanced navigation and useability.

A version alpha from the next release 2.0 can also be downloaded.

Download MSight 1.0 including two LC/MS data examples (21 MBytes)
For MS Windows XP / 2000 platforms