Curatr: a web application for creating, curating and sharing a mass spectral library

Abstract

Summary: We have developed a web application curatr for the rapid generation of high quality mass spectral fragmentation libraries from liquid-chromatography mass spectrometry datasets. Curatr handles datasets from single or multiplexed standards and extracts chromatographic profiles and potential fragmentation spectra for multiple adducts. An intuitive interface helps users to select high quality spectra that are stored along with searchable molecular information, the providence of each standard and experimental metadata. Curatr supports exports to several standard formats for use with third party software or submission to repositories. We demonstrate the use of curatr to generate the EMBL Metabolomics Core Facility spectral library http://curatr.mcf.embl.de. Availability and implementation: Source code and example data are at http://github.com/alexandrovteam/curatr/. Contact: palmer@embl.de. Supplementary information: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.