Peak detection (peak extraction) is one of the most important steps in MS data analysis. Peptide signals usually appear as local maxima (i.e. peaks) in MS spectra, hence an efficient approach to extracting significant peaks is needed to get meaningful and interpretable results.

In this part of the Tutorial we show how peak detection can be performed in the Spectrolyzer with the aid of the Peak Extraction by Clustering algorithm available in the MALDI module). Note that Peak Extraction by Clustering detects peaks automatically, taking into account both a noise level and a presence of the baseline trend in MS proteomic data. It is only assumed that raw MS data have already been imported into the Spectrolyzer (see Step 1).

In order to perform statistical data analysis extracted peaks have to be further transformed. The mandatory step is to perform binning (or peak clustering), and it will be discussed in more detail in the Step 3 of this Tutorial.