Bioinformatics Advance Access originally published online on January 2, 2008
Bioinformatics 2008 24(4):591-593; doi:10.1093/bioinformatics/btm631
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DECOMP—from interpreting Mass Spectrometry peaks to solving the Money Changing Problem

1Lehrstuhl Bioinformatik, Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena, Ernst-Abbe-Platz 2, 07743 Jena and 2AG Genominformatik, Technische Fakultät, Universität Bielefeld, PF 100 131, 33501 Bielefeld, Germany
To whom correspondence should be addressed.
| Abstract |
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Summary: We introduce DECOMP, a tool that computes the sum formula of all molecules whose mass equals the input mass. This problem arises frequently in biochemistry and mass spectrometry (MS), when we know the molecular mass of a protein, DNA or metabolite fragment but have no other information. A closely related problem is known as the Money Changing Problem (MCP), where all masses are positive integers. Recently, efficient algorithms have been developed for the MCP, in which DECOMP applies to real-valued MS data. The excellent performance of this method on proteomic and metabolomic MS data has recently been demonstrated. DECOMP has an easy-to-use graphical interface, which caters for both types of users: those interested in solving MCP instances and those submitting MS data.
Availability: DECOMP is freely accessible at http://bibiserv.techfak.uni-bielefeld.de/decomp/
Contact: anton.pervukhin{at}minet.uni-jena.de
*Authors are listed alphabetically.
Associate Editor: John Quackenbush
Received on August 13, 2007; revised on November 16, 2007; accepted on December 17, 2007