I. Spectrolyzer - a successor of the Medicwave Bionformatics Suite (MBS)
The Spectrolyzer is a new software product developed by MedicWave as a continuation of the MedicWave Bioinformatics Suite (MBS) software. While keeping the core functionality and intuitive user interface, a number of important new features has been added to the Spectrolyzer as well as some enhancements related to existing tools have been introduced. Additionally, a few changes of technical nature has been implemented in the Spectrolyzer in order to further improve software flexibility and its ease-of-use.
II. New Features and Enhancements introduced in the Spectrolyzer 1.0
- Added MALDI Protein Identification module
- Added Peptide Mass Fingerprinting (PMF) Analysis. The PMF Analysis performs identification of proteins from MALDI data using Mascot PMF search engine through exporting files.
- Enhancements in LC-MS Protein Identification module
- Changes to the Protein Identification Analysis:
- Precursor Error Type can be set by a user.
- Different cleavage patterns can be chosen or created by a user.
- Fixed and variable modifications can be chosen by a user from the extensive list of modifications.
- Improved formatting of E-scores values.
- Spectral Counting results has been added to protein identification results.
- Sequence Coverage results has been added to protein identification results. This includes information (given in percentage) on the entire protein sequence coverage by the identified peptides as well as contribution of each peptide to the protein.
- Changes to the Protein Aggregation Analysis:
- Spectral Counting results has been added to the Protein Aggregation results. This includes spectral counting computed for the two groups of samples (e.g. Disease and Control samples).
- Changes to the Protein Database Import:
- Added .fa, *.seq, *.fsa. extensions to the FASTA database extensions list recognized by the software.
- Added LC-MS Metabolites Identification Module
- Added new analysis for the Metabolite Identification. The analysis enables external metabolites identification using METLIN database batch search. The analysis wizard enables to interactively choose peaks from the LC-MS map that will be used to identify metabolites for.
- LC-MS preprocessing and visualization tools
- Added "Raw Data Feature Finding" Analysis for detecting peptide features in raw LC-MS data (based on OpenMS algorithm)
- Added "LC-MS Data Filtering" Analysis to extract m/z, Retention Time (RT) and intensity ranges from input LC-MS samples (based on OpenMS algorithm)
- Improved interactive Raw LC-MS Data Browser
- Changes in the Statistical Analysis Module
- Added "Custom Feature Selection" Analysis to interactively select or remove features of interest
- A few minor changes in the Multiple Biomarker Detection Analysis (improved algorithm to find optimal number of features, added feature frequency to results)
- Other changes of technical nature (i.e. changes in the GUI, exporting/reporting, etc.)
- More flexible licensing system introduced to facilitate configuration of software tools that better suit individual client needs
- More user-friendly installation program allowing a user to easily install an appropriate version of the Software and all required assemblies
- Proper handling of too long result filenames during export
- Displaying detailed progress messages when exporting results.
- HTML reports are more complete now.
- Updated software Manual (all versions, i.e.: PDF, HTML as well as built-in CHM).