A novel approach to denoising ion trap tandem mass spectra

BACKGROUND: Mass spectrometers can produce a large number of tandem mass spectra. They are unfortunately noise-contaminated. Noises can affect the quality of tandem mass spectra and thus increase the false positives and false negatives in the peptide identification. Therefore, it is appealing to develop an approach to denoising tandem mass spectra. RESULTS: We propose a novel approach to denoising tandem mass spectra. The proposed approach consists of two modules: spectral peak intensity adjustment and intensity local maximum extraction. In the spectral peak intensity adjustment module, we introduce five features to describe the quality of each peak. Based on these features, a score is calculated for each peak and is used to adjust its intensity. As a result, the intensity will be adjusted to a local maximum if a peak is a signal peak, and it will be decreased if the peak is a noisy one. The second module uses a morphological reconstruction filter to remove the peaks whose intensities are not the local maxima of the spectrum. Experiments have been conducted on two ion trap tandem mass spectral datasets: ISB and TOV. Experimental results show that our algorithm can remove about 69% of the peaks of a spectrum. At the same time, the number of spectra that can be identified by Mascot algorithm increases by 31.23% and 14.12% for the two tandem mass spectra datasets, respectively. CONCLUSION: The proposed denoising algorithm can be integrated into current popular peptide identification algorithms such as Mascot to improve the reliability of assigning peptides to spectra. AVAILABILITY OF THE SOFTWARE: The software created from this work is available upon request.