Blog
Articles tagged: Mascot Distiller
Peak picking intact crosslink spectra with Mascot Distiller
There are several important factors to take into account when carrying out peakpicking for an intact crosslinked dataset. You’ll typically be dealing with higher charge state precursors to handle the larger masses of the linked peptides, and the MS/MS spectra are inherently complex, chimeric spectra with fragments from the alpha and beta peptides. To look at the effects of adjusting [...]
Complementary reporter ion clusters in TMT/TMTpro labeling
We recently received a support request about complementary ions in TMTpro labeling. Complementary ions are formed during fragmentation, where the precursor loses the reporter ion and carbon monoxide, leaving behind the peptide and the balance region of the label. Complementary ion spacing is similar to reporter ions but the mass varies depending on peptide mass. The customer was concerned that [...]
Reporting quantitation datasets with Mascot Distiller 2.8
In previous versions of Distiller, reporting of quantitation results was handled using XSLT transformation of the XML export of the quantitation results. XSLT is a powerful language, but it’s not commonly used, so writing custom reports could be an uphill stuggle. In Mascot Distiller 2.8, reports are written in Python and use Mascot Parser to access the search and quantitation [...]
Divide and conquer: Fractionated Label Free Quantitation in Mascot Distiller 2.8.2
We have recently released Mascot Distiller 2.8.2. The headline new feature is support for Label-Free Quantitation of fractionated samples. With Mascot Distiller 2.8, individual raw files in a project are aligned against a consensus generated by roughly aligning and combining the total ion chromatograms (TICs) of each raw file. If a peptide match is found in one sample file and [...]
Default or prof_prof? Peak picking Thermo .RAW data with Mascot Distiller
We supply a number of processing options files for each of the main vendor raw file types with Mascot Distiller. These .opt files are designed as a reasonable starting point for peak picking your own data – but to get the very best you’ll need to tweak the parameters on a typical raw file from your instruments and then use [...]
Choosing hardware for Mascot Distiller
One question which comes up frequently with regards to Mascot Distiller is what is a good specification for the workstation it’s going to be installed on. By that, we’re really interested in what sort of CPU you should be getting, how much RAM the workstation should have, and what sort of disk drives (SSD or HDD) should you be getting. [...]
Improving precursor quantitation results with ion mobility filtering
One of the major new features in Mascot Distiller 2.8 is support for raw data files from the Bruker timsTOF instrument. timsTOF combines an ion mobility dimension with QTOF, allowing an additional separation dimension. The instrument can use this to help separate MS/MS spectra from otherwise isobaric peptides. Mascot Distiller 2.8 can use the precursor ion mobility values for identified [...]
Global thinking: Label Free Quantitation in Mascot Distiller 2.8
Mascot Distiller supports a wide range of precursor based quantitation methods, including two label-free methods, which we call Replicate and Average. Version 2.8 makes significant improvements to the Replicate method. This is the method for label-free quantitation based on the relative intensities of extracted ion chromatograms (XICs) for precursors in multiple data sets aligned using mass and elution time. Replicate [...]
Solving a puzzle with Mascot Distiller de novo
Have you tried either of the MS/MS interpretation challenges organised by EUPA and LBMSDG? Maybe you are expert enough to read off the peptide sequence, directly. If so, you can stop reading right here! If your interpretation skills and mental arithmetic are a bit rusty, we thought it might be useful to walk through how Mascot Distiller plus a bit [...]
Using the Quantitation Summary to create reports and charts
An earlier article described how to create a Quantitation Summary in Mascot Daemon. This is a spreadsheet-like text file, where the rows correspond to proteins and the columns contain expression data for various samples in the form of abundances or ratios of abundances. A Quantitation Summary can be opened and manipulated in a spreadsheet program such as Excel, and it [...]