HiXCorr: A portable high-speed XCorr 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 XCorr (cross-correlation). Since calculating XCorr is computationally intensive, a lot of efforts have been made to develop fast XCorr engines. However, the existing XCorr 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 XCorr engine for high-resolution tandem mass spectrometry by developing a novel algorithm for calculating XCorr. The algorithm enables XCorr 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 XCorr engine will expedite peptide identification by high-resolution tandem mass spectrometry.