This page is no longer maintained. Please head to github.

PVIEW: Princeton LC-MS/MS Data Viewer and Analyzer


This software implements the algorithms described in the following papers. Please cite these papers if you find PVIEW helpful for your work. Thanks!!!

You can also read about the basic idea here:

PVIEW has also been used successfully in the following papers:

PVIEW has a number of useful features

Sign up for the Google Groups email list by clicking here PVIEW Google Group.

System Requirements: For full data visualization capabilities, we recommend a computer with 8GB of RAM or more and a 64-bit operating system.

Source Code

You can now find the soruce code to pview on github at https://github.com/zia1138/pview.

PVIEW requires Qt version 5.0.x or newer and the Expat XML Parser version 2.0.1 or newer. The R Statistical Programming Language is highly recommended for data analysis.

Please read the included README for instructions on how to compile the source code for your operating system.

Binaries

For your convenience, we've created a binaries for Windows. If you're unable to run PVIEW, please try installing the Visual C++ 2008 Redistributable package (included as vcredist_x86.exe, 32-bit, or vcredist_x64_2012.exe, 64-bit, in the .zip files above).

Column Descriptions

Below are column descriptions for the main output file for isotope-labeled quantification for 2 labels:
ratio.id
identifier of a specific XIC pair used for quantification
group.id
identifier associated with a particular group of proteins
protein.group
protein group, based on peptides identified, the most specific protein IDs possible
protein.group.nfrags
number of fragments within 6-40aa for each member of the protein group, useful for absolute quantification
group.N
number of ratios in each protein group
group.log2.HL.ratio
median heavy/light ratio for protein group
group.c
isotope pair condition, pulled from directory structure
group.r
isotope pair replicate, pulled from directory structure
group.i
isotope pair instrument run, pulled from file name
L.mz
m/z of light XIC in isotope pair
L.rt
retention time of light XIC in isotope pair
H.mz
m/z of heavy XIC in isotope pair
H.rt
retention time of heavy XIC in isotope pair
log2.HL.ratio
log2(heavy/light) ratio for pair pair
log2.xicH
area under of heavy XIC
log2.xicL
area under of light XIC
log2.xicHL.avg
average of area under XICs
ms2.scanNum
spectrum scan number for MS/MS ID
ms2.mz
precursor m/z for MS/MS spectrum
ms2.score
MS/MS search score
ms2.qvalue
q-value or FDR corrected significance for search result
ms2.charge
precursor charge of MS/MS spectrum
ms2.protein
proteins from which the search result can originate from, separated by ||||, use strsplit in R
ms2.protein.nfrags
number of fragments in 6-40aa range, useful for absolute quantification
ms2.seq
peptide sequences assigned to this isotope pair
ms2.missedcleaves
number of missed cleaves in peptide match
ms2.ppm.error
precursor mass error in PPMs
mz.theory
theoretical m/z for the peptide match
ms2.Nmods
number of variable modifications in peptide match
ms2.origin
XIC from which match was obtained (heavy or light)
ms2.shared
set to true if peptide is shared between multiple protein groups

Thermo2PVIEW: Converting .RAW files to PVIEW .mzXML

PVIEW takes only centroided mzXML files as input. For ThermoFisher LTQ-Orbitrap and LTQ-FTICR instruments, we recommend you collect the MS1 scans in profile mode and MS2 scans in centroid mode. If the data files are too big, centroid MS1 and centroid MS2 work just as well.

For your convenience, we provide a utility we call Thermo2PVIEW that will convert a directory of ThermoFisher LTQ-Orbitrap or LTQ-FTICR .RAW files into PVIEW compatible .mzXML files. Click here to download (Windows 64-bit, thermo2pview_win64_17jan2014.zip) the Windows binary.

In order to use Thermo2PVIEW you need to uncompress the .ZIP file and run MSFileReaderSetup.exe. Then try running the Thermo2PVIEW.EXE. If Thermo2PVIEW still doesn't run, try installing the Visual C++ redistributable package vcredist_x86.exe.

Thermo2PVIEW uses a library provided by ThermoFisher for accessing their .RAW files. MSFileReader. If you want to see the source code of Thermo2PVIEW, you can by clicking here to You can now find the soruce code to thermo2pview on github at https://github.com/zia1138/pview.

mzXML file organization

PVIEW can analyze complex experiments, but it requires you use a very specific directory structure for your files. First, you should create a directory with your experiment name (e.g. MyExperiment). In this folder, you should copy FASTA files containing the amino acid sequence information for your contaminant proteins, organismal proteins, and any other proteins you expect. These are merged into one single data base automatically. NOTE: No reverse/decoy databases are necessary PVIEW constructs them automatically!

MyExperiment/contaminants.fasta
MyExperiment/my_organism_proteins.fasta
MyExperiment/my_other_proteins_proteins.fasta

For an isotope labeled experiment, lets say that you collect two experimental conditions relative to a common reference. For each of those two conditions you collected two replicates and for each replicate you used two gel or SCX fractions. You will have a total of 8 mzXML files from 8 instrument runs. These files should be organized as follows:

MyExperiment/Condition1/ReplicateA/ReplicateA_Fraction1.mzXML
MyExperiment/Condition1/ReplicateA/ReplicateA_Fraction2.mzXML
MyExperiment/Condition1/ReplicateB/ReplicateB_Fraction1.mzXML
MyExperiment/Condition1/ReplicateB/ReplicateB_Fraction2.mzXML

MyExperiment/Condition2/ReplicateA/ReplicateA_Fraction1.mzXML
MyExperiment/Condition2/ReplicateA/ReplicateA_Fraction2.mzXML
MyExperiment/Condition2/ReplicateB/ReplicateB_Fraction1.mzXML
MyExperiment/Condition2/ReplicateB/ReplicateB_Fraction2.mzXML

For alignment-based label-free quantification, the directory structure containing the mzXML files is a little different. lets say you ran 4 replicates of the same sample from condition #1 and four replicates of another sample from condition #2. Each of the 4 replicates can be divided into technical replicates consisting of two replicates each. For this experiment, you can organize the files as follows:

MyExperiment/Condition1/BioRepA/TechRep1.mzXML
MyExperiment/Condition1/BioRepA/TechRep2.mzXML
MyExperiment/Condition1/BioRepB/TechRep1.mzXML
MyExperiment/Condition1/BioRepB/TechRep2.mzXML

MyExperiment/Condition2/BioRepA/TechRep1.mzXML
MyExperiment/Condition2/BioRepA/TechRep2.mzXML
MyExperiment/Condition2/BioRepB/TechRep1.mzXML
MyExperiment/Condition2/BioRepB/TechRep2.mzXML

PVIEW will align the technical replicates first and then it will align the biological replicates. Last, it will align across conditions.

PepXML External Search Engine Support

PVIEW has an internal search engine, but also allows you to import search results from external search engines using the PepXML file format. In order to load PepXML files, create an additional directory under MyExperiment called pepxml.

MyExperiment/pepxml

In this directory put all of your validated PepXML files.

MyExperiment/pepxml/validated1.pep.xml
MyExperiment/pepxml/validated2.pep.xml

PVIEW will automatically detect PepXML files in this directory and load your search results.

You can convert the output of external search engines using tools from the TPP.

Keyboard Interface

All interaction with the GUI occurs using the following shortcut keys. Future versions will have a better mouse driven interface.

Algorithm Options and Parameters

Algorithm options and parameters are described below based organized by tab in the "Data Load Configuration" dialog box. The parameters descriptions are organized by tab. A lot of these parameters are in PPMs. Note that that ppm * 1e-6 * m/z = Da.

Data These parameters control how much of the data should be loaded and how many CPUs to use to load the data. If you have a 4-core computer set the load threads parameter to 4! XICs These parameters control aspects of finding XICs in the data. They need adjustment depending on chromatography, gradient, and instrument type. Free These parameters control aspects of label-free quantification. Isotope These parameters control aspects of stable isotope labeled quantification. Add, select, and remove isotope labels. Click and highlight the isotopes to select those present in your data. New user-defined isotopes can be added. MS2 These parameters control database search. Fixed Add, remove, and select fixed modifications. Select items in modification list to activate. Multiple fixed modifications can be selected at one time. A new fixed modification requires the following information: Variable Add, remove, and select variable modifications. Select items in modification list to activate the modification. Multiple fixed modifications can be selected at one time. A new variable modification has to be specified by first entering a description, then specifying a mass shift. Once this information is specified, then individual fragment modifications can be entered. These are specified by entering an abbreviation, effected amino acid codes, and a mass shift relative to the precursor mass shift. This can be set to zero by opening the mass calculator just hitting OK.

Tutorials

In order to learn how to use PVIEW (it's not that hard), we provide several tutorials below.

Stable Isotope labeled Quantification Tutorial

Stable isotope labeling is currently the least noisy method for quantification. It works by the introduction of a heavy isotope at a specific Dalton shift. PVIEW now has initial support for three labels: heavy, medium, and light.
  1. Download (VanHoof2009_subset.zip, 290MB) and unzip a subset of a large phosphoenriched data set. Note the original RAW files have already been converted to mzXML and centroided. The full data is from a the Cell Stem Cell paper Phosphorylation dynamics during early differentiation of human embryonic stem cells and can be download from Proteome Commons. It has the following Tranch hash number:
    g8hGaNTX/w5BHBEt9+NwoPQLeenbTK7xNKGFk23dkLpfEsf4IuHCLcXRBUjSwanxykWXwSjW51xGYRTzrLxKNGMkMugAAAAAAABsPg==
  2. Make note of the directory structure. There are two time points and only one replicate of each time point in this subset.
  3. Run PVIEW. Chose File > Open and select the VanHoof2009_subset directory that was created when you unzipped the data set.
  4. Click through the tabs and make note of a few parameters. First, under the "Load" tab set the parameter "load threads" to the number of processors on your computer. Next, under the "Isotope" tab Lys8 and Arg10 are selected as labels. The "Use Isotope Mode" box is checked to indicate that isotope labeled quantification should be used. Under the "MS2" tab up to 4 variable mods are allowed per peptide and under the Variable tab each of STY phosphorylation is selected. Note also that under the "Memory" tab "Keep raw peaks" is unchecked. This is for systems that have smaller amount of RAM. If you have more than 4GB of RAM you should check "Keep raw peaks."
  5. In order to load and process the data click the "Load data..." button. This will take a few minutes.
  6. Once this processing is done you can navigate the data set using the keyboard commands. If you click on the "Isotope" tab, you will see a tree view of protein groups. Keep clicking until you see a tryptic fragment and for that fragment a list of ratios. You can double click on this ratio and entry and PVIEW will automatically jump to the corresponding isotope pair in the data set.
  7. Next you can save and analyze the data by selecting the menu item "Isotope Pairs > Save All.." Find a destination directory and enter "VanHoof2009.txt" Once you do this PVIEW will generate several tab delimited table files VanHoof2009.txt (list of isotope pair ratios), VanHoof2009_corr.txt (data for correlating replicate isotope labeled runs, not really relevant here), VanHoof2009_internal.txt (data for computing protein level internal ratio correlations), VanHoof2009_internal_pep.txt (data for computing peptide level internal ratio correlations), VanHoof2009_mass_error_ms1.txt (precursor mass error data), VanHoof2009_mass_error_ms2.txt (MS/MS mass error using b1+ and y1+ fragment ions), VanHoof2009_table.txt (summary data in tabular format on a per-protein group basis), and VanHoof2009_table_pep.txt ( summary data in tabular format on a per-peptide basis).
  8. With your version of PVIEW you should find an R Programming Language script called reports.R. Copy this into the directory containing all of the CSV files and run R in that directory. Run the following commands in R: source("reports.R") to load the script and isotope.pair.report("VanHoof2009.txt"). Run q() to quit R.
  9. Running these R commands will create subdirectory called VanHoof2009 that will contain several useful plots. mass_error.pdf and mass_error2.pdf contain the precursor mass error and product ion mass error distributions respectively. internal_[30,240]min.pdf and internal_[30,240]min_Rep1.pdf correlates ratios of two groups of tryptic fragments from the same protein at the condition and replicate level. internal_[30,240]min_pep.pdf correlates duplicate measurements (e.g. different charge state) of the same peptide in the data. internal_[30,240]min_pep_mod.pdf does the same thing but for peptides with PTMs. For runs that have replicates of the same condition, you will also get plots that have the following name format: corr_xxxx.pdf. These correlate ratios across the replicates.
  10. Any of the tab-delimited CSV files can be loaded into a spreadsheet program like Microsoft Excel. They can also be easily read into the R for statistical analysis by using the following command data <- read("VanHoof2009_xxx.txt", stringsAsFactors=F). You can run names("data") to get the column names in each CSV files.

Orbitrap Velos Data

For fun, I added a tutorial for an isotope labeled data set collected on a Thermo Scientific Orbitrap Velos. The data set is from the recent paper Super-SILAC mix for quantitative proteomics of human tumor tissue.
  1. Download (Velos.zip, 1.3GB) and unzip the data set. I've done the .mzXML conversion for you already
  2. Run PVIEW. Chose File > Open and select the Velos directory that was created when you unzipped the data set.
  3. In order to load and process the data click the "Load data..." button. This will take a few minutes.
  4. Once this processing is done you can navigate the data set using the keyboard commands. If you click on the "Isotope" tab, you will see a tree view of protein groups. Keep clicking until you see a tryptic fragment and for that fragment a list of ratios. You can double click on this ratio and entry and PVIEW will automatically jump to the corresponding isotope pair in the data set.
  5. Next you can save and analyze the data by selecting the menu item "Isotope Pairs > Save All.." Save the data by entering "Velos.txt" in the dialog box.
  6. With your version of PVIEW you should find an R Programming Language script called reports.R. Copy this into the directory containing all of the CSV files and run R in that directory. Run the following commands in R: source("reports.R") to load the script and isotope.pair.report("Velos.txt"). Run q() to quit R. In the Velos sub-directory created by the R script, you should see several useful plots for assessing the data quality.

Alignment-Based Quantification Tutorial

Alignment based quantification is a label-free quantification technique. Instrument runs are nonlinearly aligned and XICs are grouped based on their retention time. This allows MS/MS IDS to be transferred across instrument runs, increasing the number of proteins and peptides quantified.
  1. Download (BYRMFoss2007.zip, 1.4GB) and unzip each of these 10 replicates each of yeast strains RM11-1a and BY4716 from the study Genetic basis of proteome variation in yeast by Foss et al.
  2. Make note of the directory structure. Each of the FASTA files are the project BYRMFoss2007 directory. The ten replicates each of strain RM11-1a and BY4716 are in the RM and BY subdirectories respectively.
  3. Run PVIEW. Chose "File > Open" and select the BYRMFoss207 directory. It was created when you unzipped the data set.
  4. Click through the tabs and make note of a few parameters. First, under the "Load" tab set the parameter "load threads" to the number of processors on your computer. Click on the "Free" tab and notice that "Use align mode" is checked. This tells PVIEW to align LC-MS/MS runs. Also "align translation" and "align nonlinear" are checked to perform the maximum amount of retention time correction. Note that "min cond thres" is set to 2 requiring that a peptide should XIC occur in both strains and "Minimum instrument runs" is 5 designating that the signal occurs in 5 out of the 10 replicate instrument runs. Note also that under the "Memory" tab "Keep raw peaks" is unchecked. This is for systems that have smaller amount of RAM. If you have more than 4GB of RAM you should check "Keep raw peaks."
  5. In order to load and process the data click the "Load data..." button. This will take a few minutes.
  6. Once this processing is done you can navigate the data set using the keyboard commands. Try pressing the Z key and drawing a box. This will zoom into the data. Try hitting the S key to show the XICs with their IDs. Also try hitting the O key to show the aligned and grouped XICs across instrument runs. If you click on the "XIC" tab you will see a tree view of protein groups. Keep clicking until you see a tryptic fragment and for that fragment a list of area under the XIC values under the fragment. Double click on one of these and PVIEW will automatically jump to the corresponding XICs aligned in the data set.
  7. Next, you can save and analyze the data by selecting the menu item "Label Free > Save CSV.." Find a destination directory and enter "BYRMFoss2007.txt" Once you do this PVIEW will generate several tab delimited table files BYRMFoss2007.txt ( per-protein quantification table), BYRMFoss2007_peptides.txt (per-peptide quantification table), BYRMFoss2007_internal.txt ( ratio correlations between all pairs of conditions), BYRMFoss2007_mass_error.txt ( precursor mass errors), and BYRMFoss2007_mass_error_ms2.txt (fragment ion mass errors).
  8. With your version of PVIEW you should find an R Programming Language script called reports.R. Copy this into the directory containing all of the CSV files and run R in that directory. Run the following commands in R: source("reports.R") to load the script and internal.align.report("BYRMFoss2007.txt"). Run q() to quit R.
  9. Running these R commands will create subdirectory called BYRMFoss2007 that will contain several useful plots. mass_error.pdf and mass_error2.pdf contain the precursor mass error and product ion mass error distributions respectively. interal_BY_RM.pdf computes ratios for each tryptic fragment between two conditions (here strains of yeast). If a protein has two or more tryptic fragments, it groups the fragment ratios into two groups and then correlates the two groups.
  10. Any of the tab-delimited CSV files can be loaded into a spreadsheet program like Microsoft Excel. They can also be easily read into the R for statistical analysis by using the following command data <- read("BYRMFoss2007.txt", stringsAsFactors=F). You can run names("data") to get the column names in each CSV files.

XIC-based Quantification

For XIC-based quantification, XICs are "cross-referenced" based on their protein and sequence information across experimental conditions. These cross referenced XICs are used to fill a table with quantification values. The analysis of this data proceeds exactly the same way as alignment-based quantification, except you need to make sure that both "Use Isotope Mode" and Use Align Mode are not checked. You can save the output using Label Free > Save CSV... and use the same scripts to analyze the output. This mode is particularly useful for cases where you have many gel fractions per experimental condition and the alignment is not consistent across these gel fractions.

License

BSD License

Copyright (c) 2014, Princeton University, University of Maryland - College Park

All rights reserved.

Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met:

THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED BY THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS AND CONTRIBUTORS "AS IS" AND ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE ARE DISCLAIMED. IN NO EVENT SHALL PRINCETON UNIVERSITY BE LIABLE FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES (INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, PROCUREMENT OF SUBSTITUTE GOODS OR SERVICES; LOSS OF USE, DATA, OR PROFITS; OR BUSINESS INTERRUPTION) HOWEVER CAUSED AND ON ANY THEORY OF LIABILITY, WHETHER IN CONTRACT, STRICT LIABILITY, OR TORT (INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE OR OTHERWISE) ARISING IN ANY WAY OUT OF THE USE OF THIS SOFTWARE, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE.