Compression of LC/MS Proteomic Data

The unrelenting growth ofmass spectrometry (MS) based proteomic data to gigabytes per sample and terabytes per experiment motivates this investigation into compression methods suited to MS signal sources. The data for this study was derived from peptides of hand-mixed protein samples passed through a high performance liquid chromatography system (HPLC) and an electrospray ionization time-of-flight (ESI-TOF) mass spectrometer. Several lossless data compression methods were applied and yielded up to a 25:1 compression ratio relative to the original files containing base64 encoding of the data.