GNU polyxmass - Summary

This software is part of the GNU Project.

Aim:

This project aims at giving a Free User a mass spectrometric framework for predicting/analyzing mass data for any polymer sequence of any polymer type.

General organization of the GNU polyxmass package's modules:

The GNU polyxmass framework is made of a number of packages that are described below.

1) libpolyxmass: the library where any non-graphical chemical intelligence is coded. This library also contains housekeeping functions used in the polyxmass-bin package

2) polyxmass-bin: the binary program 'polyxmass' that the user actually uses in order to perform all its work in a graphical user interface. The tasks include:

  - in the polyxdef module:
    - defining the atoms that GNU polyxmass can work with;
    - defining any new polymer chemistry (polyxdef);
  - in the polyxcalc module:
    - compute masses using a polymer chemistry-aware desktop
      calculator (loading a polymer chemistry definition is
      optional);
  - in the polyxedit module, the user will make use of the
    following features:
    - fully customizable graphical display and editing of polymer
      sequences;
    - fully customizable chemical modification reactions either
      on the whole polymer sequence or on selected monomer(s)
      in that polymer sequence;
    - fully customizable polymer sequence cleavage reactions
      (with partial cleavage feature);
    - fully customizable polymer sequence gas-phase fragmentations;
    - annotation of the sequence through setting an unlimited
      number of notes either to the single monomer(s) or to the
      whole polymer sequence.


The polyxmass-common and polyxmass-data packages contain data that are necessary (polyxmass-common) and optional (polyxmass-data) in order to run GNU polyxmass. These packages overall contain an atom definition file and polymer chemistry definitions (protein, rna, dna, saccharide).

The User Manual is located in polyxmass-doc in the form of a set of LaTeX files that can be compiled to a PDF-formatted file using pdflatex. Note that the manual is available as an already compiled file from the GNU polyxmass homepage.

Registration Date: Wed 26 Nov 2003 01:38:24 PM UTC
License: GNU General Public License v2 or later
Development Status: 4 - Beta