COSS: A fast and user-friendly tool for spectral library searching

Spectral similarity searching to identify peptide-derived MS/MS spectra is a promising technique, and different spectrum similarity search tools have therefore been developed. Each of these tools, however, comes with some limitations, mainly due to low processing speed and issues with handling large databases. Furthermore, the number of spectral data formats supported is typically limited, which also creates a threshold to adoption. We have therefore developed COSS (CompOmics Spectral Searching), a new and user-friendly spectral library search tool that relies on a probabilistic scoring function, and that includes decoy spectra generation for result validation. We have benchmarked COSS on three different spectral libraries and compared the results with established spectral search and sequence database search tools. Our comparison showed that COSS identifies more peptides, and is faster than other tools. COSS binaries and source code can be freely downloaded from https://github.com/compomics/COSS. O_FIG O_LINKSMALLFIG WIDTH=200 HEIGHT=70 SRC="FIGDIR/small/640458v1_ufig1.gif" ALT="Figure 1"> View larger version (14K): org.highwire.dtl.DTLVardef@1b1bfacorg.highwire.dtl.DTLVardef@9ec990org.highwire.dtl.DTLVardef@c31055org.highwire.dtl.DTLVardef@654e47_HPS_FORMAT_FIGEXP M_FIG C_FIG