mzID

Release: Devel:

mzID is a package that allows parsing of mzIdentML files. The mzIdentML file format has been created by HUPO as a standardized format for collecting data from peptide identification analyses based on LC-MS type experiments. The parser is kept bare bone in order to make it as general as possible.

mzID is part of Bioconductor and can be installed through there.

Main Features

• mzID(filename) parses the mzIdentML file at the location specified by filename into an mzID object
• flatten(mzID_object) flatten the content of the mzID object into a data frame with a row for each psm
• The parser is written to support the multitude of different ways peptide identification can be performed and thus be recorded in the mzIdentML format
• Defines a class to handle a collection of identification results efficiently
• Relies heavily on the XML package (which uses libxml2) for parsing
• Respects the fact that peptide identification results are not inherently tabular in format. The mzID class contains several different classes each handling different part of the analysis data
• The parser is being optimized for speed within the bounds of needing to be general for all mzIdentML files. This means that a parser only handling a very specific analysis pipeline could likely be faster, but still the parser is fairly fast

Roadmap

• Make the parser software aware, so that it can create more beautiful output based on the software used in the analysis
• Performance improvements