Liquid chromatography–mass spectrometry (LC-MS) is a powerful analytical technique for detecting and identifying components of complex mixtures. Though there are many tools for working with LC-MS data, widely available ones tend to cater to particular types of users. On the one hand, there are GUI applications, often provided by device vendors. These are easy to use, but lack flexibility. On the other hand, there are powerful frameworks like OpenMS. These offer a great deal of flexibility, but they require sophisticated C++ programming knowledge to use.

The software application emzed was developed to fill this gap and provide an easy to use and integrative environment that offers the flexibility required by ETH researchers. Originally driven by the needs of Julia Vorholt's group (Web Site), emzed is now an environment for interactive development of LC-MS data analysis workflows available to whole community. It leverages the power of OpenMS and LCMS related R libraries, and packages it in an easy-to-use Graphical User Interface, supporting development of analysis workflows in Python. In addition to the Vorholt group, the software has since been deployed at other sites and has been extended to support novel needs.

Emzed peak viewer.

Emzed peak map viewer,
Example 1.

Emzed peak map viewer,
Example 2.