Evaluation of the performance of a tandem mass spectral library with mass spectral data extracted from literature

MSforID represents a database of tandem mass spectral data obtained from (quasi-)molecular ions produced by atmospheric pressure ionization methods. At the current stage of development the library contains 12 122 spectra of 1208 small (bio-)organic molecules. The present work was aimed to evaluate the performance of the MSforID library in terms of accuracy and transferability with a collection of fragment ion mass spectra from various compounds acquired on multiple instruments. A literature survey was conducted to collect the set of sample spectra. A total number of 554 spectra covering 291 compounds were extracted from 109 publications. The majority of spectra originated from publications on applications of LC/MS/MS in drug monitoring, pharmacokinetics, environmental analysis, forensic analysis as well as food analysis. Almost all types of tandem mass spectrometric instruments distributed by the five most important instrument vendors were included in the study. The overall sensitivity of library search was found to be 96.4%, which clearly proves that the MSforID library can successfully handle data from a huge variety of mass spectrometric instruments to allow accurate compound identification. Only for spectra containing three or more fragment ions, however, the rate of classified matches (= matches with a relative average match probability (ramp) score > 40.0) was 95%. Ambiguous or unclassified results were mainly obtained for searches with single precursor-to-fragment ion transitions due to the insufficient specificity of such a low amount of structural information to unequivocally define a single compound. Copyright (C) 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.