TargetSearch swMATH ID: 19123 Software Authors: Cuadros-Inostroza, Álvaro; Caldana, Camila; Redestig, Henning; Kusano, Miyako; Lisec, Jan; Peña-Cortés, Hugo; Willmitzer, Lothar; Hannah, Matthew A. Description: TargetSearch - a Bioconductor package for the efficient preprocessing of GC-MS metabolite profiling data. Background: Metabolite profiling, the simultaneous quantification of multiple metabolites in an experiment, is becoming increasingly popular, particularly with the rise of systems-level biology. The workhorse in this field is gas-chromatography hyphenated with mass spectrometry (GC-MS). The high-throughput of this technology coupled with a demand for large experiments has led to data pre-processing, i.e. the quantification of metabolites across samples, becoming a major bottleneck. Existing software has several limitations, including restricted maximum sample size, systematic errors and low flexibility. However, the biggest limitation is that the resulting data usually require extensive hand-curation, which is subjective and can typically take several days to weeks. Results: We introduce the TargetSearch package, an open source tool which is a flexible and accurate method for pre-processing even very large numbers of GC-MS samples within hours. We developed a novel strategy to iteratively correct and update retention time indices for searching and identifying metabolites. The package is written in the R programming language with computationally intensive functions written in C for speed and performance. The package includes a graphical user interface to allow easy use by those unfamiliar with R. Conclusions: TargetSearch allows fast and accurate data pre-processing for GC-MS experiments and overcomes the sample number limitations and manual curation requirements of existing software. We validate our method by carrying out an analysis against both a set of known chemical standard mixtures and of a biological experiment. In addition we demonstrate its capabilities and speed by comparing it with other GC-MS pre-processing tools. We believe this package will greatly ease current bottlenecks and facilitate the analysis of metabolic profiling data. Homepage: http://bioconductor.org/packages/release/bioc/html/TargetSearch.html Dependencies: R Related Software: Bioconductor; rTANDEM; GO.db; reactome.db; Reactome; rols; hpar; Rcpp; TEXshade; OrgMassSpecR; IPPD; synapter; MALDIquant; XML; MSnbase; mzr; knitr; RforProteomics; R Cited in: 0 Publications