MS-viewer: a web-based spectral viewer for proteomics results.

The sharing and viewing of peptide identification results from search engines analyzing mass-spectrometry-based proteomic data is made difficult by the range of analysis tools employed, in that each produces a different output format. Annotated results associated with a journal article often have to be made available, but providing these in a format that can be queried by other researchers is often difficult. This is because although standard formats for results have been developed, these are not necessarily easy to produce. In this manuscript we describe the MS-Viewer program, part of the Protein Prospector Web package, which uses easy-to-create tabular files as input for providing highly interactive viewing of search engine results. Thanks to the simplicity and flexibility of the input format, results from a wide variety of search engines have been successfully viewed through the Web interface of this tool.