MSdeCIpher: A Tool to Link Data from Complementary Ionization Techniques in High-Resolution GC-MS to Identify Molecular Ions

TL;DR

MSdeCIpher is a new tool that combines data from different ionization methods in GC-MS to identify molecular ions more efficiently.

Contribution

MSdeCIpher is the first freely available tool to combine fragment-rich and soft ionization datasets in high-resolution GC-MS.

Findings

MSdeCIpher consistently ranks the correct molecular ion among the top positions in test datasets.

The tool reduces the number of candidate molecular ions for each fragment spectrum.

It enables the use of compound identification tools that require molecular masses as input.

Abstract

Electron ionization (EI) and molecular ion-generating techniques like chemical ionization (CI) are complementary ionization methods in gas chromatography (GC)-mass spectrometry (MS). However, manual curation effort and expert knowledge are required to correctly assign molecular ions to fragment spectra. MSdeCIpher is a software tool that enables the combination of two separate datasets from fragment-rich spectra, like EI-spectra, and soft ionization spectra containing molecular ion candidates. Using high-resolution GC-MS data, it identifies and assigns molecular ions based on retention time matching, user-defined adduct/neutral loss criteria, and sum formula matching. To our knowledge, no other freely available or vendor tool is currently capable of combining fragment-rich and soft ionization datasets in this manner. The tool’s performance was evaluated on three test datasets. When molecular ions are present, MSdeCIpher consistently ranks the correct molecular ion for each fragment spectrum in one of the top positions, with average ranks of 1.5, 1, and 1.2 in the three datasets, respectively. MSdeCIpher effectively reduces candidate molecular ions for each fragment spectrum and thus enables the usage of compound identification tools that require molecular masses as input. It paves the way towards rapid annotations in untargeted analysis with high-resolution GC-MS.

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